It irks me when I hear someone say, “Yeah, the kid wheezes a little but he’s ok. Sometimes she can’t catch her breath, but she’ll be fine.”
When someone tries to minimize the harm that asthma can cause, it REALLY irks me.
It irks me when I hear that a power plant is trying to minimize the harm that their emissions do. And…it irks me when they dismiss various scientists, including those that conducted a study that scientifically estimates:
“…the contribution of environmental pollutants to the incidence, prevalence, mortality, and costs of pediatric disease in American children. [They] examined four categories of illness: lead poisoning, asthma, cancer, and neurobehavioral disorders. “ [1] What they found was alarming, “ Total annual costs are estimated to be $54.9 billion (range $48.8-64.8 billion): $43.4 billion for lead poisoning, $2.0 billion for asthma, $0.3 billion for childhood cancer, and $9.2 billion for neurobehavioral disorders.”
That’s all numbers, all money. The true cost – Children. The children who are unable to run and play, who take medications to be able to breathe, in order to function normally in a regular school day.
The true cost was discussed on the recent Mom’s Clean Air Force call about asthma in Latino kids. We heard the heartbreaking story of a young girl who died as a result of an asthma attack. One of the topics we talked about was how schools deal with kids who need to carry their inhalers. I was heartened to hear that in every State it is now law that children over a certain age must carry and self-administer their inhalers. Here is a link to the CDC’s page on Asthma in Schools. It provides links to each State’s rules (some require letters from doctors and/or parents).
For my Military Readers – Do you know what the rules are in DoDD schools?
The American Lung Association has a program – the Asthma-Friendly Schools Initiative. You can use with your community and school, to work together to make schools more welcoming to children that suffer from asthma.
For those of us who don’t have kids with asthma, why should we worry? There are so many other things for us to worry about with our kids (or in my case, my grandchild), school bullying, grades, how awful the school lunch is, or how well she’s getting along in school.
What is the cost of asthma?
– For every child with asthma, there will be an adult with asthma who will need medical care.
– The majority of children with asthma come from poverty, and need medical care that may be subsidized.
– Children with asthma have parents who need to leave their jobs to take them to the doctor, to care for them when they have an attack and to stay home with them.
I’d prefer to believe that most of us want to cut down on the incidence of asthma in kids, because we don’t want to see a child struggling to breathe, we don’t want to see a child relegated to the sidelines because they had an attack.
Knowing that the more polluted our air is, the harder it is for kids to breathe; and knowing that some companies put their profits ahead of these kids absolutely irks me!
So what do we do about it? We make sure the EPA isn’t gutted of its ability to safeguard the air we breathe.
Mom’s Clean Air Force is trying to make sure that all of us are heard in this ongoing debate. One voice is great, but putting that voices can make a huge difference and send a LOUD message to our public officials!
Sources:[1] Landrigan PJ, Schechter CB, Lipton JM, Fahs MC, Schwartz J 2002. Environmental Pollutants and Disease in American Children: Estimates of Morbidity, Mortality, and Costs for Lead Poisoning, Asthma, Cancer, and Developmental Disabilities. Environ Health Perspect 110:721-728. doi:10.1289/ehp.02110721