Worldwide, over 300 Million persons are living with Asthma.

In Kenya, the burden of Asthma is unknown but studies conducted several years back reported a prevalence of 10% among the adult population.

BreathEasy is a public health Asthma Care Initiative with a goal to improve access to high quality Asthma care services including quality-assured Asthma medicines. It aims at ensuring: –

• Establish sustainable training programmes for all cadres of  health care workers including community health care workers
• Create awareness  about asthma to enable effective actions to be taken by all  persons  at all levels
• Provide appropriate diagnostic equipment and accessories at all levels of the health care system
• Establish asthma model clinics for  learning/training on asthma and to generate scientific information to guide policy and practice  development
• Provide commodities including drugs at the most cost effective  prices at all levels of the health care system
• Establish an asthma surveillance system to allow for the monitoring of  the burden of asthma, and  the responses to standardized  asthma care approaches

Current Asthma projects:

1. Asthma Care Improvement Project (ACIP)

This is an Asthma Care enhancement project targeting Asthma patient from the low socio – economic stratum such as those who live in urban slums.

The project objectives are to:

• Support facilities to establish Model Asthma clinics
• Improve access to quality-assured Inhaled Asthma Medicines at a fair price
• Encourage the use of Inhaled Corticosteroids for Asthma management
• Strengthen recording & reporting for Asthma cases

2. African Severe Asthma Project (ASAP)
This is a Multi-Country Asthma research project funded by GSK-Open Laboratory implemented in sites in Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda.

The project objective is Characterize Severe Asthma in Africans to determine Asthma determinants: demographic, clinical, physiologic, pathologic, immunologic and genomic determinants