Over the past two decades, childhood asthma has received considerable attention from federal health agencies, researchers, health professionals, and school officials. Two reasons for this attention include the high impact that asthma has on the pediatric population, and the dramatic rise in asthma prevalence since 1980 (the reasons for this increase are poorly understood). In addition to helping understand the burden posed by childhood asthma, tracking asthma prevalence helps to better allocate research, prevention and intervention resources and assess the impact of these efforts.

The next two slides lay out this background in more detail.