Asthma mortality -- Illinois, 1979-1994.

Asthma is a chronic inflammatory disorder of airways characterized by variable airflow obstruction with airway hyperresponsiveness. In the United States, the mortality rate associated with asthma has increased steadily since 1979. Uneven distributions of deaths attributable to asthma have been observed among different racial/ethnic groups. To examine the distribution of asthma deaths in Illinois, trends in asthma death rates were analyzed for 1979-1994 for Illinois residents. This report presents the findings of this analysis, which indicated that, compared with asthma death rates in the United States for 1982-1991, rates in Illinois were higher and the asthma mortality ratio for blacks to whites was higher.