[neverdem]

ping

[NativeNewYorker]

I am certain there is a Federal program that net **subsidizes** folks who claim to have asthma.

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.

[NonValueAdded]

Further, if you look at the regulation Bush wanted changed, you will find that the change would improve air quality and had as a core requirement that pollution levels would not increase. As I understood it, previous regs required a power plant to upgrade all of their equipment if making any modifications at all. The result, plants would make no efficency improvements at all because the cost would mean a tremendous investment. By that time, any plant that could justify the cost had made the improvements. Result, stalement. Under the proposed regs, a plant could install new equipment thereby increasing efficiency while improving air quality. They could only do so if the change did not increase their pollution output.^* Therefore, to follow Kennedy's charges, it was the DemocRATs that encouraged the existing pollution levels to remain the same; Bush tried to improve things!

^*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-friendly^TM

[Dan from Michigan]

One thing forgotten about asthma. I'll have to say this very loud over the leftist media.

ASTHMA IS INHERITED

There. I have it. Several aunts uncles and cousins have it. My grandma had it. We all lived in different areas.

It's genetic.

[aruanan]

Did you hear about increased incidence of asthma among children who as infants and toddlers were given multivitamins?

[GOP_1900AD]

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.

[COUNTrecount]

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.

[Capriole]

The genetic predisposition to develop restrictive airways disease can be inherited. During the 1950s and 1960s new medications permitted the survival of severely ill asthma patients who wouldn't otherwise have lived to reproductive age. Then those asthmatics had kids, and their kids had kids, and we are now in the third and fourth generation in some cases. Thus, the tendency to acquire asthma upon exposure to allergic insult is disseminated through the population. Unfortunately, some of these kids get seriously ill, especially when they come into contact with the cigarette smoke and cockroach refuse that are endemic in the worst parts of the inner city, and sometimes their cases aren't followed as closely as they should be. And so we have black children dying in growing numbers.

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.