Bermuda will join 80 countries observing World Asthma Day next week.Open Airways is to celebrate the occasion on Tuesday with a special event at City Hall.Information about asthma, and free spacers and microfibre cloths will be available and lung function tests will be on offer to smokers and former smokers over age 40.World Asthma Day is an annual event organised by the Global Initiative for Asthma to improve asthma awareness and care throughout the world.This year’s theme is ‘You Can Control Your Asthma’.One way to do that is to get on an asthma action plan. Initiated by the Department of Health, it includes the use and monitoring of a peak flow meter, said Liz Boden of Open Airways.“The aim is to have at least 50 percent of all the children with [asthma with] a plan by the end of the year. We hope paediatricians and all the GPs on the Island will also start to give asthma action plans soon. In the US more than 50 percent of asthmatics have an action plan. Very few people have them here; we have a lot of work to do.“Jennifer Wilson, the asthma nurse for the Department of Health whom we work closely with, is hoping to give all middle and high school students a peak flow meter so that they can learn to monitor their asthma. A peak flow meter is used to measure your expiratory flow, in other words it tells you how well you are breathing. We want people over the age of ten years to record their peak flows for a few weeks while they are well and then know what their personal best peak flow is. This way we can set up the asthma action plan.”Asthma is a potentially life-threatening illness and Bermuda has one of the highest rates of asthma in the world. Over 9,000 people have the illness, including an estimated one in five children and one in ten adults. Last year 2,029 visits were made to King Edward VII Memorial Hospital’s Emergency Department, because of asthma.“Each visit tells us that management of asthma has failed,” said Mrs Boden. “Most people have two to three days warning that asthma is getting worse before they visit the hospital. If everybody with asthma had an action plan those visits to emergency would fall dramatically.”Signs of asthma include coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath and a tight chest.“The recession is definitely affecting asthma control,” Mrs Bolden said. “We’ve discovered at health fairs, when people turn up for tests, that they are not taking their prevention. At the men’s health fair over 400 men turned up, mostly unemployed and uninsured. There was one man who was wheezing badly and we said ‘have you got these inhalers?’ and he said ‘yes, they are at the pharmacy waiting to be refilled but I have no money’. The recession is making for extra challenges, but I think we have made fantastic progress as a community.”Useful website: www.openairways.com