Asthma is a long-term lung disease that can begin at any age. It's one of the most common long-term diseases in children. The Missouri Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) Program provides data on emergency department and hospital visits for asthma in Missouri.
What is Asthma?
Asthma is a long-term lung disease that can make it hard to breathe. An asthma attack happens the muscles around the airways to tighten and the lining of the air passages swell (or become inflamed). There is no cure for asthma, but there are ways to control it. One way is to avoid triggers in the environment that can make asthma worse.
Environmental triggers include cigarette smoke, air pollution, and things that cause allergies, like pet hair, dust mites, cockroach allergens, and pollen and mold. Asthma symptoms can also be caused by lung infections, exercise, cold air, stress, and allergies to food or medicine.
Asthma Data
Emergency Department and Hospitalization Data
Search this query to find:
Annual numbers of emergency department visits and hospitalizations
Annual crude rates of emergency department visits and hospitalizations, per 10,000 residents
Annual age-adjusted rates of emergency department visits and hospitalizations, per 10,000 residents
Other Data Sources
Other data sources share additional data on asthma, including data on the number of people diagnosed and living with asthma.
Asthma data can help you:
- See if some communities or populations are at increased risk of asthma
- See if asthma is going up or down over time
- Direct resources for preventing and controlling asthma
- See progress towards lowering asthma risks
The National Environmental Public Health Tracking Program
Missouri Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) is a program within the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services and funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. EPHT is part of a network of people and information systems which delivers a core set of health, exposure, and hazards data, information summaries and tools to enable analysis, visualization and reporting of insights drawn from data. Those insights are intended to help data drive actions and improve community health.