The Maltese government has spent over €1,000,000 to provide the country’s asthma sufferers with free inhalers.

To put it into simpler terms, the government spends about €2,700 every single day on the medicine.

This, it should be noted, does not paint the full picture, with a significant number of asthma patients acquiring their essential medicine privately.

The amount spent by the government on inhalers has grown year-on-year, jumping up from €826,312 in 2015 to €1,053,956 by the end of 2018.

It remains to be seen whether the growth is due to an increase in cases or just an increase in the number of people applying for the ‘pharmacy of your choice’ (POYC) initiative.

Malta already has a significantly high rate of respiratory illnesses with around 15% suffering from such disease, while roughly 1.5% live with a severe condition. When it comes to chronic asthma, there are approximately five new cases per day.

The causes behind the rate of asthma cases in the country may be disputed. However, evidence suggests that the country’s poor air quality may be behind it.

A joint EU-Maltese study found that Maltese people were between two to fives times as likely to develop a respiratory illness than their Sicilian counterparts.

The most recent EU statistics (2015) found that Malta has the fourth-worst levels of harmful particles, standing at 50 micrograms per cubic metre right on the EU daily limit value.

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