Feds Seek To Reduce Disparities In Childhood Asthma Rates
What do agriculture, transportation and justice have to do with childhood asthma? More than you think.
Federal public health officials today announced a new designed to eliminate the racial and ethnic gap among children suffering from asthma. The Departments of Agriculture, Justice and Transportation — as well as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services — are teaming up to combat the respiratory disease in minority communities.
The is to pool the knowledge and resources of these various federal entities to ultimately lower asthmas sizeable public health costs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates the total cost of asthma to the public, in both medical costs and lost school and work days, is $56 billion a year.
In rolling out the task force, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said this collaborative approach is necessary to combat an illness that can be exacerbated by so many different substances: dust, air pollution and tobacco smoke, just to name a few.
You can get great care for asthma at your doctors office, but it wont do much good if they dont know how to treat it at your school, she said. And you can have a great community health center down the street, but it will be hard to stay healthy if the air in your neighborhood is polluted.
Sebelius saidthenumbersonasthmain the U.S. are improving for the overall population. While the percentage of all Americans diagnosed with asthma has almost tripled since 1980,CDCdata show the rate of asthma attacks has been holding steady.
However, Sebelius said these numbers hide huge disparities among minority communities.
“It’s caused by genetic makeup, it’s caused by environmental triggers, it’s caused by a lack of quality health care,” said Angel Waldron, a spokesperson with the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. “We cant do anything about genetics, but we can be aware. If a doctor knows both [of a patient’s] parents had asthma, you need to be tested immediately. But if youre not insured, things like that can be overlooked.”
African-American children are particularly at risk for contracting asthma. According to a CDC survey, theyre more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with the respiratory disease than white children.
are also much more prone to the disease. Their asthma rate there is more than twice as high as the rate for Hispanic children as a whole.
