When Breath Becomes A Burden

A silent epidemic, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is preventable but, worryingly, under-diagnosed

- Rina Mukherjee

Devidas Hari Tayade is a labourer in the Yawal Taluka in Maharashtra’s Jalgaon district. Addicted to bidis since he was 13, Tayade worked as a milkdelivery boy, and then moved to digging wells in his village for the next 20 years.

Around eight years ago, he started experiencing acute shortness of breath—a feeling that no matter how hard or deeply he inhaled, his lungs always felt short of air. “I attributed this to the heavy work,” he says. But the discomfort persisted, eventually compelling him to move to Pune to work as a watchman. Eight months ago, on his wife’s insistence, he got himself examined. This was when 68-year-old Tayade was diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). However, he is yet to give up on tobacco, a leading cause of this condition. “I smoke only 10 or 11 bidis a day; it used to be 50 earlier,” he admits.

Across the country, in Kolkata, lives 82-year-old Krishna Kamal Das, formerly a busy executive and a regular smoker 40 years ago. Das would suffer from frequent bouts of cough and cold, but each time a phase began, he would brush it off. “Every time I travelled abroad, my cough would disappear, but the moment I returned to Kolkata, it came back,” he says. It was only after he retired that his cough gradually turned worse, frequently accompanied by breathlessness. A visit to a pulmonologist confirmed COPD.