Today’s AJC includes a letter from our friends at the Georgia Poor Public Policy Foundation:
Asthma: Dirty air isn’t main culprit
The front page news about asthma was illuminating for the lack of knowledge about asthma (”Death rate falls but asthma in children at all-time high,” Page One, Dec. 13). To claim the causes of childhood asthma are still not known to health professionals is startling. For decades air pollution was claimed to cause asthma. But to the reporter’s credit, he didn’t make that claim.
Among the facts about asthma from the Department of Human Resources listed at the end of the article could have been this one: From 1999-2003, hospitalizations for asthma in the Atlanta metro area (the most polluted air in the state) were about 40 percent lower than the state average.
Outdoor air pollution as a cause of asthma is fading, as it should.
HAROLD BROWN
Brown, of Athens, is professor emeritus at the University of Georgia and an adjunct scholar with the Georgia Public Policy Foundation.
Included in the original article’s content (emphasis mine):
Dr. Lara Akinbami, the CDC medical officer who conducted the study, said in an interview that it’s not clear why more children are being diagnosed. However, she said it’s probably due to a combination of factors, including an obesity epidemic among today’s youths, who in general are less active and exposed to more allergens than their counterparts of two decades ago.
Meanwhile, in New York, the high rate of Asthma in the South Bronx has been linked to soot from Diesel fuel (an allergen):
Soot particles spewing from the exhaust of diesel trucks constitute a major contributor to the alarmingly high rates of asthma symptoms among school-aged children in the South Bronx, according to the results of a five-year study by researchers at New York University’s School of Medicine and Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
Over the course of the study, asthma symptoms, particularly wheezing, doubled among elementary school children on high traffic days, as large numbers attend schools in close proximity to busy truck routes because of past land-use decisions.
South Bronx has some of the highest concentration of limited-access highways in the nation, thanks to Robert Moses.
