Ireland needs healthier airways and lungs: the evidence (INHALE)

To the Editor:

We would like to congratulate the European Respiratory Society on the publication of the European Lung White Book. Here, on the western periphery of Europe, we have felt that our Irish Health Service is not fully aware of the importance of lung diseases and the resources necessary to deal with them. Accordingly, we have recently published a report entitled “Ireland needs healthier airways and lungs: the evidence”, which has been circulated with the latest issue of the Irish Medical Journal. This report describes morbidity, mortality and treatment data for all types of lung disease in children and adults, involving both primary care and the hospital service. We chose a national publication in order to target planners in our health service and the Irish Thoracic Society supported the launch of the document.

Our work uncovered some disturbing facts. In Ireland, deaths from respiratory disease equal those from coronary artery disease and exceed those due to nonrespiratory cancer. Ireland has the highest death rate from respiratory disease in western Europe; death rates are over twice the EU average and nearly twice the European average. In Europe, only Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have higher death rates from respiratory disease. The relative burden of respiratory disease in Ireland is rising, as that of heart disease decreases. The total direct medical cost for respiratory disease in Ireland was 388.7 million in 2001.

We invite readers of the European Respiratory Journal and members of the European Respiratory Society to read our document, which is available for free download in pdf format at www.imj.ie or www.imo.ie. We believe that our document complements the contents of the European Lung White Book (available at www.ersnet.org) and presents the statistics relating to lung disease in a more detailed national context for Ireland. By highlighting the scope of the problems in this large-volume, but politically unfashionable area, we hope that more effort and resources will be directed to policies and services that will improve standards of care for patients with pulmonary disease.