The Global Asthma Network
- The Global Asthma Network is an international NGO that seeks to provide lower and middle-income countries with access to improved and effective asthma care. They are of interest as they have collaboration centers in target U.S. Cities, as well as surveillance centers in target international cities.
- They have sponsored research and set up hundred of data collection centers over the world. They also champion awareness for asthma as a major noncommunicable disease and provide access to high quality medications across the world.
- This way of thinking developed when the ISAAC, the precursor to the Global Asthma Network formed in 1991. It was formed as a merger between two groups from New Zealand and Germany, conducting studies on asthma severity and time trends of asthma, respectively.
- They claim to be a unique project in terms of the massive scale that they are collecting data and performing research. This does not so much suggest a problem with other organizations so much as flaunts their superiority over other smaller organizations.
- They have used their own data collected from hundreds of research centers set up and run by them. They have visualizations of the percent of people in each country affected by asthma, as well as any changes from 2011-2014 in the number of people affected by asthma near certain collection centers.
- They rely on the Global Asthma Report, published every three years. The reports provide information on other organizations, as well as reporting information from the GAN's own collection centers. They also draw upon research by the World Health Survey and the European Community Respiratory Health Survey.
- They rely on over 300 centers in over 100 countries to collect data. They also rely on the Asthma Drug Facility to provide access to essential and inexpensive medications for their patients.
- It works within a worldwide ecology and has a similar style of operation to a United Nations organization. This means that they have been trained to deal with asthma on a global scale and local scale simultaneously, with each operation center adapting to the local culture while still staying relatively uniform with the hundreds of other centers worldwide.
- Reports of cities in lower-income countries where over twenty percent of youth have asthma have motivated their focus on poorer countries and setting up many centers to collect data and provide medication in those regions. Seeing where asthma prevalence is increasing and decreasing also influences their plans for creating new operation centers.
- They are funded by the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease. Although International Union focuses on different chronic lung diseases, like tuberculosis and COPD, there is still some overlap in their research, meaning that this funding serves to help the International Union fight against more lung ailments. They also receive funding from various international universities.
- The fact that the group was spawned from the amalgamation of two foreign groups working on asthma prevalence and severity that shaped their focus on fighting both of these issues.
- What it does find challenging is getting governments to take asthma as a serious heath issue, especially in poorer nations.
- The GAN calls for governments to keep essential medications for asthma affordable. For example, GAN is against the Trans-Pacific Partnership due to the fact that the agreement reduces the ability of the group to negotiate for inexpensive medications, making it harder for the group to supply low-income nations with them.
- The Asthma Files could benefit from gathering information from their many collection centers about asthma in target cities. The Asthma Files already seems to adopt some of the policies of the GAN, such as having a worldwide reach. The Asthma Files can reach out to the GN to convince them to work in cooperation with governments to reduce pollution their countries and alleviate some of the conditions that exacerbate asthma.