Complacency is the worst enemy of asthma control, according to the experts. And failure to adhere to medication regimes and a reluctance to take up protocols known to help keep the condition under control are frustrating efforts to reduce its toll.
"The general dogma in the community is that asthma is not really bad," Graham Hall, head of paediatric respiratory physiology at Telethon Kids Institute said. "There are still around 400 asthma deaths every year in Australia so for a disease that is apparently 'not a big deal' there are still a lot of families affected by it." 
Asthma is one of the biggest reasons why children will present to the emergency department and, according to Australian Institute of Health and Wellbeing data, there were just over 37,000 hospitalisations in 2012-23 where asthma was the primary cause.
"We know that individuals who have asthma tend to have a poorer quality of life; even in the comparatively reasonably controlled people asthma will interfere in their daily living," Professor Hall said.
It might stop them from doing exercise, from being able to participate in school or work at a normal level and people with asthma, especially young people, were more at risk of mental health issues. 
Diagnosis of asthma has been problematic in past decades, swinging between under-diagnosis to over-diagnosis, according to Mark Everard, scientific adviser to Asthma Foundation WA. 
Determining the difference between wheezy bronchitis and asthma in early childhood and what required antibiotics or asthma medication could be a tricky line to walk for medical professionals. 
It was only when patients were older, at school age, that making a diagnosis was easier. 
"The only test for asthma is: if you go on asthma treatment are you dramatically and unequivocally better, and some kids are," Professor Everard said. "If we say you can't diagnose asthma under five, then kids under five will suffer by not getting treatment: if we say they all have asthma, far too many kids will get inhalers so what we have to do is get it right."
Professor Everard said there had been no big breakthroughs in asthma since the 1970s. 
"The inhalers we use now are 60 years old. In what other area of medicine do we use 60-year- old technology," he said.
Without breakthroughs what was needed was to do the simple things well. 
"If you teach people properly, they can use the devices but what they often do is forget or use it differently because they think they can get away with it.
"We know from evidence you have to take at least four out of five doses for it to work."
Professor Hall said determining the origins of asthma and how it could be prevented remained the "million-dollar question".
"Asthma is a highly heterogeneous disease, so it is not that there is one risk factor or one genetic reason or one trigger that causes it," he said. "There isn't a cure for asthma at the moment and I'm not sure we will have a cure in the future. 
"We've known for a long time that the immune system is intrinsically linked with asthma but now we are starting to see, primarily in animal models, that there are ways to turn off the risks for developing asthma by shifting the immune system so that it doesn't go down the pathway that increases your risk of asthma if you are then exposed to other triggers, like viruses," Professor Hall said.
That work is a long way from getting into human trials but in the meantime, Professor Hall said, people had more control over their asthma than they realised. 
Smoking while pregnant dramatically increases the chance of the baby going on to develop asthma, so if every person stopped smoking tomorrow, in 5-10 years' time we would have less asthma. 
There was also data to show that if you increased physical activity and had a healthy diet you could reduce the severity of your asthma. 
'There are still 
around 400 asthma deaths every year in Australia so for a disease that is apparently 
"not a big deal" there are still a lot of families 
affected by it.'
Graham Hall