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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (4746)	2/21/2008 5:47:51 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Respond to of 42652

Yes, the "too clean" hypothesis is out there but solid data is not yet available..... The contrary is true however: Just Breathing Can Be a Problem in Some Poor Neighborhoods Posted on: Wednesday, 13 February 2008, 18:01 CST By Tonyaa Weathersbee Here in Jacksonville, we already know that a disproportionate number of black babies don't live past the age of 1. Now, it seems that too many black children who manage to make it to their first birthday are starting out life having to fight to breathe. That, among other things, is what the Duval County Health Department revealed last week when it released its study on how asthma, like infant mortality and violence, is especially hobbling the quality of life for black people here. Black children ages 1 to 4 made up 13.3 percent of all emergency room visits with a primary diagnosis of asthma, whereas white children in the same age group made up 5.2 percent of such visits. It gets worse with age. While white children age 5 to 14 accounted for 5.1 percent of all asthma-related emergency room visits, black children in that age category accounted for 18 percent of those visits. Blacks are also hospitalized for asthma more than whites. In 2005, the asthma hospitalization rate was 235.4 per 100,000 for blacks, while it was 123.1 per 100,000 for whites. That means that the black rate of being hospitalized for asthma is 91.2 percent higher than the white rate. But behind those disturbing statistics are, if people care to look, revelations. Because the lopsided cases of asthma among blacks reveal, just like the infant mortality rates, that Jacksonville doesn't just have a problem with health. It has a problem with poverty. Many of the black adults and children struggling with asthma live in ZIP codes 32206, 32208 and 32209. Those are the city's poorest areas. They are places where many people live in crumbling houses with rats and insect dander, or near industrial areas where rents are cheaper but the air quality isn't all that it could be. Unfortunately, the life circumstances that cause illnesses like asthma often spiral into problems that outsiders see as a matter of bad character but which may really be a matter of hopelessness and frustration. For example, black youths who are chronically truant may not necessarily be missing school because they are lazy but because they can't breathe. The person who loses a job because of chronic absenteeism may not be a lazy person but may have asthma or other health problems that eventually frustrate her into just giving up. "There are a lot of inequities in the community," Dana Fields- Johnson, director of Healthy Jacksonville 2010, told me. "There's a lot of chronic asthma, and it's causing a lot of people to miss work and school." But people don't have to yield to those inequities, Fields- Johnson said. Healthy Jacksonville has compiled an Asthma Resource Directory. It contains information on the American Lung Association, the Community Asthma Partnership, the Family Health Center, and an abundance of resources that help people manage asthma rather that allow it to manage them. For copies of the directory, call (904) 253- 2520. Of course, controlling asthma doesn't mean that people should give up on fighting the economic disparities that materialize in the health problems and other pathologies that plague the city's poorest areas. But what it does is point them to the resources that can help them live to fight another day.tonyaa.weathersbee@jacksonville. com (904)359-4251 (c) 2008 Florida Times Union. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved. Source: Florida Times Union