A review on chronic respiratory diseases and rapidly evolving COVID-19 situation

Microbiology

Chronic respiratory diseases (CRDs), affecting the airways and other structures of the lungs, constitute a serious public health problem in all countries throughout the world, mainly in developing countries or deprived populations. Globally, they affect 1 billion people and 4.2 million deaths. Some of the most common are tuberculosis (TB), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, occupational lung diseases and pulmonary hypertension etc. These respiratory diseases make up five of the 30 most common causes of death: COPD is third; lower respiratory tract infection is fourth; tracheal, bronchial and lung cancer is sixth; TB is twelfth; and asthma is twenty-eighth. Unfortunately, these pulmonary diseases have received proportionately less public attention and less research funding than other disease entities. Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a major health problem causing severe acute respiratory illness in humans. To date, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected over five million individuals worldwide and killed thousands of individuals of all ages and ethnicities. Recent studies showed that people with poor immune function such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease, cancer, renal and hepatic dysfunction are at higher risk for severe COVID-19.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.