Armenia: Environmental Change Spurs Respiratory Diseases

A dramatic increase in respiratory diseases over the past several years means that Armenia is now struggling to breathe, physicians and public health specialists say. While government representatives downplay the problem, environmentalists point to desertification as the cause.

Between 2001 and 2005, the number of respiratory diseases registered in Armenia increased by 45 percent to just over 161,000 cases, according to statistics from the Ministry of Health.

Andranik Voskanyan, one of Armenia's chief lung specialists, believes that the real number of individuals suffering from respiratory diseases, particularly asthma, is much higher than officially reported. Voskanyan estimates that the number of such cases has at least doubled in the past decade. He is also seeing respiratory disease strike at an earlier age. "A few years ago the youngest child suffering from asthma was five or six