Posted on 08/10/2004 12:25:39 PM PDT by neverdem
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August 10, 2004, 8:32 a.m. The Asthma Attack
Is George W. Bush against black children breathing? In the current political environment, no charge against President Bush is too poisonous or preposterous to make, including this one.
In promoting his new book, which basically accuses Bush of being a fascist, environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has loosed this assault: "One out of every four black children in New York now has asthma. Those asthma attacks are triggered by pollution from power plants, which George Bush let off the hook." So potent is the notion of Bush denying children their very breath that John Kerry repeated the charge by implication in his speech at the Democratic Convention: "What does it mean when 25 percent of children in Harlem have asthma because of air pollution? America can do better, and help is on the way."
This ranks among the most transparently nonsensical charges against the president. Start with the fact that air pollution has been declining in recent years, as it has been for decades. Name your pollutant, it's been dropping: particulate matter, ozone, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, lead, whatever. Cleaner air the result of regulation and improved technologies should be hailed by environmentalists as one of their signature accomplishments. Instead, they pretend it doesn't exist.
In light of this, the question we should be asking is: Why is declining air pollution associated with increased rates of asthma? Because the nation is indeed in an asthma epidemic. Rates of asthma a chronic inflammatory disease of the lungs have more than doubled in the past 20 years. Cases have gone from 6.8 million in 1980 to 17.3 million in 1999. There is just very little evidence that air pollution, let alone George Bush, is causing anyone to get the condition.
Environmentalists point to a study in California showing that kids who played three or more team sports a small percentage of the total sample in high-ozone areas were more likely to get asthma than similar kids in lower ozone areas. What environmentalists fail to mention is that kids overall were 30 percent less likely to get asthma in the high ozone areas than in the low ozone areas. American Enterprise Institute expert Joel Schwartz has crunched the California numbers and found that the asthma rate in many communities with lots of air pollution is lower than in communities with little pollution in other words, there is no consistent association of pollution with increased asthma rates.
Make no mistake: High rates of pollution can impair lung function. There is some indication that air pollution in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s did just that. But the United States is now well below those highs, and most of the United States has always been below those old Southern California levels. Even massive reductions in air pollution from current levels would probably have little effect. Schwartz points to an environmentalist-sponsored study that concluded that a reduction in power-plant emissions of 75 percent would reduce hospital admissions for serious respiratory or cardiovascular conditions by a mere 0.2 percent to 0.6 percent.
It's a mystery why asthma rates have soared. Maybe kids spend more time indoors in houses that, since the energy crisis of the 1970s, are efficiently sealed off from outside air, and so trap irritants like dust mites, cockroach droppings and pet dander. Maybe increasing obesity and declining physical activity play roles. Some researchers have even pointed to the declining use of aspirin or the generally cleaner, less infectious world kids live in today, which might mean that their immune systems overreact to things like dust.
Given all of this, Kerry's implied pledge to end the asthma epidemic stands as one of the emptiest political promises of all time. Is he going to launch a crusade against pet dander if that's proven a major cause of the epidemic? But for Bush critics, all medical uncertainties and research imponderables disappear before their one all-purpose epidemiological insight: It is George Bush's fault.
Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.
(c)2003 King Features Syndicate
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http://www.nationalreview.com/lowry/lowry200408100832.asp
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ping
Maybe kids spend more time indoors in houses that, since the energy crisis of the 1970s, are efficiently sealed off from outside air, and so trap irritants like dust mites, cockroach droppings and pet dander.
BINGO!
Why?
Out of the blue, during the 90s, posters/ads went up all over NYC mass transit encouraging people (all the photos were of blacks) to be tested for the ailment.
The agitprop has been consistent, and clearly well-funded.
OBVIOUSLY sick folks should be certain to attend to their ailments, but the specific targeting of the disease and the cohort is highly suspicious.
Was it Kerry who claimed that he had asthma years ago and backed down when Rush caught him in that lie?
*To be fair, I guess you could say that efficiency improvements might happen that did not improve the pollution index BUT would reduce fuel consumption thereby meeting another national goal and also, by definition, would reduce CO2 emissions thereby being Kyoto-friendlyTM
There. I have it. Several aunts uncles and cousins have it. My grandma had it. We all lived in different areas.
It's genetic.
Did you hear about increased incidence of asthma among children who as infants and toddlers were given multivitamins?
1. More kids survive today. The new asthma medicines are fantastic and great strides have been made treating premature infants. Twenty years ago, a lot of severe asthmatics would have died in infancy or from pneumonia as children.
2. City kids are told to stay inside and watch TV or play video games. Their mothers figure they'd rather have fat kids than pregnant, drop-out, drug addicted kids. It used to be if you lived in the city your mother would tell you to go outside. Those days are gone.
3. The improved medications result in more kids being diagnosed with asthma. Twenty or thirty years ago kids who wheezed occasionally when they got a cold were said to be prone to bronchitis - they had to stay in bed with the vaporizer going til they got better. The new drugs give these same types of kids much easier winters, but now they get the asthmatic label.
I read a report, I think on this forum some time back, that was about cockroach infestations causing asthma in children.
I'm pretty sure you have found the answer.
First of all if cases of Asthma ARE increased in Harlem (andI would have to see some peer-reviewed studies that bore that out and showed when they ramped up) of course Robert Kennedy took into consideration the attack on the World Trade Center and the fact the city was covered in toxins as a result.
Over two years after the attacks, when I visited there you could still see workers cleaning the brick buildings from caked-on soot from that horrible day. You would see what looked like insulation laying alongside the curbs and gutters, almost as if as they wash off the sidewalks, yet another layer of this stuff would be washed into the streets...
IMHO Robert Kennedy really showed his ignorance to place blame for this directly at Bush's doorstep. Heck, when we moved to the desert and CLEAN air, my husbands asthma returned. He'd not been bothered for many a year when we lived in the smog basin called Southern California, but in the clear air of the Arizona desert, he is.
In addition: Buildings in the Harlem district of NYC are old and were built before regulations against asbestos and lead paint. As these old buildings are vacating and being rehabilitated (this is becoming the next "it" place to move in NYC since Clinton located there) they are removing the toxins in these buildings... then you have the types of heating systems, they are old! They get dusty... I could go on and on, but surely Robert Kennedy doesn't think we should pay to move these kids out of Harlem and tear down these old buildings? Perhaps, the Kennedy family could start a refurbishment program with some of their money! instead of expecting tax payers to bare the costs...
And...if he's so concerned about alternative energy sources for automobiles (while he and people like him fly around in private jets burning more fuel than I'll burn in a lifetime) these "wealthy" individuals should start funding research with all this money they feel they shouldn't be allowed to keep (from their tax cut).
Why More Black Kids Have Asthma:
http://www.respiratoryreviews.com/jul00/rr_jul00_asthmakids.html
Two Quotes:
The researchers did not find racial differences when testing for sensitization to major indoor allergens, including cockroaches. However, they did find that black children were more likely than white children to be sensitized to ragweed and grass. These findings support the hypothesis that black children may be predisposed to asthma.
Poverty isn't the only reason black children have greater asthma morbidity and mortality than white children do. Physiologic differences--specifically, reduced lung function and higher immunoglobulin E (IgE) levels--may contribute to increased asthma severity in black children.
That was the finding of researchers who studied 569 children age 6 to 8 years, 14% of whom were black.[1] "Our study was unique because the African American children were from a middle class suburban area," lead author Christine Joseph, PhD, told RESPIRATORY REVIEWS. Black children in previous pediatric asthma studies typically came from poor urban areas.
Where did Robert Kennedy obtain his research??
The vast increase in asthma in all sectors of the US population is probably attributable to the aggressive control of childhood lung infections, the overly tightly sealed homes most people now live in and the overall reduction in the amount of true nuturing children get early on since most Moms now work.
Plus ... This stuff all boils down to less housecleaning being done than was the case 20 or 30 years ago. Fewer stay at home Moms = dirtier houses.
If you listen to Kerry's speech he says "children in Harlem suffer frorm HAIR pollution." I guess he was referring to Al Sharpton's uncontrollable urge to use Aqua Net on his 'do.
Kerry Implied He Had Developed Asthma Since He Began Living In Washington, DC And Had Started Using An Inhaler As A Result. Kerrys speech was preceded by a roundtable discussion in which 14 Roxbury residents and area political activists discussed a variety of health problems they attributed to the concentration of pollution sources in their neighborhood. Klare Allen of Roxbury held up a map showing that eight of the citys nine trash-transfer stations are in the neighborhood. Many of the parents and some of the children in the group complained of asthma. Until I went to Washington, I had never had asthma in my life, Kerry said in response. He said pollution in the city has prompted him to use an inhaler like those used by some of Roxbury residents. (Glen Johnson, Kerry May Make GOP Wealth A Campaign Issue, The Boston Globe, 4/23/03)
Kerry Later Explained The Inhaler Was For Common Springtime Allergies And He Hadnt Used It In Months. In an interview afterward, Kerry clarified his remark by explaining that he used an Albuterol inhaler for common springtime allergies, but his condition is not serious enough to limit his physical activity. I rarely use it; I havent used it in months, he said. (Glen Johnson, Kerry May Make GOP Wealth A Campaign Issue, The Boston Globe, 4/23/03)
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About Entrez Text Version Entrez PubMed Overview Help | FAQ Tutorial New/Noteworthy E-Utilities PubMed Services Journals Database MeSH Database Single Citation Matcher Batch Citation Matcher Clinical Queries LinkOut Cubby Related Resources Order Documents NLM Gateway TOXNET Consumer Health Clinical Alerts ClinicalTrials.gov PubMed Central |
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NCBI | NLM | NIH Department of Health & Human Services Privacy Statement | Freedom of Information Act | Disclaimer Jul 27 2004 06:47:37 |
I just checked PubMed. There's nothing.
I wrote too soon. I changed asthma AND multivitamins to asthma AND vitamins. I guess this is what you're referring to.
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About Entrez Text Version Entrez PubMed Overview Help | FAQ Tutorial New/Noteworthy E-Utilities PubMed Services Journals Database MeSH Database Single Citation Matcher Batch Citation Matcher Clinical Queries LinkOut Cubby Related Resources Order Documents NLM Gateway TOXNET Consumer Health Clinical Alerts ClinicalTrials.gov PubMed Central |
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NCBI | NLM | NIH Department of Health & Human Services Privacy Statement | Freedom of Information Act | Disclaimer Jul 27 2004 06:47:37 |
Before anybody asks what the basis is for makign statements like this: my views were developed in conversation with the clinical researchers at the National Jewish Hospital and Research Center, the nation's foremost center for investigation of respiratory and immune disordes.
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