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It is imperative for the health and safety of millions of workers that we ensure that breathing systems needed for protection are widely available, convenient and economical.

My wife Kris and I enjoy keeping an active lifestyle, so it's hard to imagine what it would be like if breathing problems kept me from participating in the activities I love to do. But that's exactly what happens to many people who develop COPD, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Breathing air is a liberating experience. It freed our ancestors from the constraints of staying wet or having to remain within easy reach of water for refuge, respiration or reproduction. But the biggest change it made in our lives was to expose us to a whole new range of sensory experience.

By preventing pneumonia and other diseases, we are giving men, women and children the chance to live healthy productive lives and participate in the global economy. In doing so, we are not only enhancing their futures - we are enhancing our own.

There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs there'd be no place to put it all.

I think modern societies have to ask a very basic question: What strategies buy the most health for people? Doctors can do so many marvelous things now. They can keep a corpse alive, almost.

Here's the thing: I am not only a creature of civilization, I'm an asthmatic person. I will only live so long as I have stockpiled the proper inhalers. I'm effectively a cyborg. You know how in Jurassic Park, they bred those dinosaurs with the lysine deficiencies, so if they ever got off the island, they'd die? That's me.

Taking care of yourself is being there for your kids, like how on a plane, they tell you to put on your oxygen mask first.

Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coordination.

There are some people who walk into a room and they oxygenate it, by their very being there's fresh air. Then there are those who come in with the smell of death and they suck the life out.