A March student has started a campaign calling on Theresa May to make asthma inhalers free.

Kira Gibson is starting her second year of college and is getting ready for university next year.

Now she is 19 she has to pay for prescriptions but she said she often cannot afford them yet it is essential life saving equipment.

She has launched a petition calling for the life saving treatment to be free.

“When I turned 19 this year, I had to start paying for my inhalers and a lot of the time ended up skipping out on getting my repeat prescriptions because I cannot afford it,” she said.

“I cannot afford a pre-payment certificate so end up going through the blue inhalers a fair few times a day because I cannot afford my preventer inhaler.

“I know other people have the same difficulty as me and I want to be able to get the cost of asthma inhalers cut because rom my own experience, the simple fact is, I cannot breathe.

“I cannot afford the prescription to be able to breathe, and you have to pay to stay alive which I find quite frankly, absurd.

“I want others like me to be able to get their prescriptions and to be able to breathe well.

“It also covers things like bronchitis and other lung issues like pneumonia and pleurisy that cause people to need inhalers to be able to breathe.

“My aim is to try and get all inhalers to be free, much like contraceptions are and other medications for certain illnesses.

“Most of all, I don’t want to be relying on the blue inhaler to keep me out of hospital anymore.”

Kira suffered asthma from a baby and said she was in and out of hospital.

“As I got older, these visits died off and my asthma started to regulate under asthma inhalers and pills,” she said.

When she got to secondary school, she started to get more asthma attacks and found her inhalers didn’t work properly.

A spokesman for Asthma UK said: “One in 11 people in the UK have asthma and tragically three people die every day because of asthma attacks.

“Despite this many people still don’t realise how serious the condition is. We work to highlight the impact that asthma has on people’s lives and to raise awareness of the work of our staff, researchers and supporters.”