That struggle has a name: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). It is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, claiming more than 3 million lives each year. And yet, it remains one of the least recognised.
On this World COPD Day, we are called to do something simple but powerful: to notice. To see the people who are living with this disease — and to act early enough so that others never have to.
The good news is that COPD is preventable and treatable; but too often it is diagnosed too late to give the victims a fighting chance. This is especially true in low- and middle-income countries, where nearly 90% of COPD deaths occur and people are often treated for pneumonia again and again before anyone tests their lungs.
In higher-income countries, it’s mistaken for the natural toll of ageing or blamed on bad luck, rather than understood as the chronic, progressive disease it is.
The tragedy is not that we don’t know what works — it’s that we don’t yet do it everywhere. We know that reducing exposure to tobacco smoke, air pollution and occupational dust prevents COPD. We know that early diagnosis through simple lung-function testing changes lives. And we know that access to inhaled medicines, pulmonary rehabilitation and oxygen therapy saves them.
So the path forward is clear: detect early, protect lungs from harm and deliver care to everyone who needs it.
But policy and medicine alone will not solve this crisis. We need a change in mindset. For too long, lung health has been treated as an afterthought in global health conversations — overshadowed by diseases that capture headlines or affect the heart. Yet the ability to breathe is the foundation for everything else: to learn, to work, to play, to live fully.
That is why I have accepted this role as the WHO Director-General’s Special Envoy for Chronic Respiratory Diseases — to make the invisible visible. To unite countries, clinicians, communities and patients in a common cause: ensuring that every person, everywhere, has the right to breathe clean air and live free from preventable lung disease.
We cannot afford to wait for the next generation to fix what this one ignored. The air we breathe binds us together — rich and poor, urban and rural, north and south. When the air grows heavy with smoke, dust or neglect, it weighs on us all.
So this World COPD Day, let us lift that weight. Let us build health systems that measure what matters. Let us put lung health on every agenda — from climate to cancer, from cities to schools.
Because every breath saved is a life extended. Every life extended is a community strengthened. And when the world breathes easier, progress itself becomes possible.
José Luis Castro is WHO Director-General’s Special Envoy for Chronic Respiratory Disease. The article marks World COPD Day which concurs on Nov 19 every year.
https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion/3138665/lifting-the-weight-on-our-lungs
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