Asthma cases rise faster in Southeast

A summit in Tampa explores why the region has a higher incidence of pediatric asthma and what can be done to help.

By CRAIG PITTMAN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 26, 2003

TAMPA -- With childhood asthma on the rise nationally, the number of cases in the Southeast is outpacing those in other parts of the country, federal officials said Tuesday.

"The rates are rising, and they are rising particularly in the South," said Dr. J. Jarrett Clinton, regional administrator for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Atlanta.

Clinton, addressing a first-ever asthma summit for this region, acknowledged that health and environmental officials have not sufficiently addressed the problem.

The two-day summit is a first step toward changing that.

Yet federal officials who spoke during the summit's opening session Tuesday said they are looking to the states to take the initiative.

Proposed solutions include battling air pollution, convincing parents to stop smoking and teaching school and day care employees how to help asthmatic children.

Asthma is the most common chronic childhood disease in the country, affecting about one in every 13 school-aged children. The American Lung Association estimates that of the 24.7-million people who have been diagnosed with asthma, more than a third are children.

The percentage of children with asthma is rising more rapidly in preschool children than in any other age group, the Environmental Protection Agency says.

The disease -- an inflammation of the airways that can restrict the flow of air into the lungs -- already is the leading cause for children missing school, accounting for an estimated 10-million missed days per year.

It's also the leading cause for children requiring emergency room care. The annual cost of treatment, Clinton said, is $3.2-billion

An estimated 821,000 children across the Southeast had at least one asthma attack in 2000, according to EPA deputy regional director Stan Meiburg, "which is higher than in other regions."

Meiburg said no one knows why the South has such a higher incidence of pediatric asthma, just as no one knows why rates of childhood asthma are increasing nationwide.

No one knows how many of Florida's 3.6-million children suffer from asthma because no one is tracking those numbers, said Dr. James M. Sherman, associate chairman of the pediatrics department at the University of Florida.

Officials in Miami-Dade County are launching a pilot project to track pediatric asthma cases, Sherman said, in the hopes that they can show the way for the rest of the state.

Scherman said estimates of the number of asthmatic children in Florida range from 6 percent to 13 percent. That would translate to a range of 218,000 to 474,000 children afflicted with chronic wheezing and coughing.

In 1999, Florida hospitals reported 23,958 admissions with a principal diagnosis of asthma. Children 17 and under accounted for a third of those -- 8,992 cases, according to the state Agency for Health Care Administration.

For instance, All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg reported 459 children hospitalized because of asthma problems in 1999 -- more than any other hospital in Pinellas County.

The cause of asthma is unknown, although theories include genetics, obesity and air pollution.

Another theory about the upswing in childhood asthma nationwide ties it to building codes developed during the energy crisis of the 1970s, which resulted in homes and apartments that might not allow for proper air circulation, said Dr. Stephen Redd, chief of the air pollution and respiratory diseases branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Researchers know that a range of factors can trigger an asthma attack, including dust mites in bed linens. Redd noted that "the Southeast seems to have a lot of those house dust mites."

Many of the plans that health and environmental officials have come up with so far focus on those triggers. They call for educating parents to the risks of second-hand smoke, for instance, and retrofitting diesel-powered school buses to burn cleaner fuel.

Meiburg also touted the Bush administration's new "Clear Skies" initiative for cleaning up pollution from power plants in the next 15 years, a plan that includes allowing power plants to trade pollution credits.

The two areas in Florida with the worst air pollution problems are the two that get their electricity from coal-fired power plants: Pensacola and the Tampa Bay area.

The Tampa Bay area will get cleaner air starting next year, thanks to a lawsuit the EPA filed against Tampa Electric Co. that resulted in TECO agreeing to switch to natural gas. That lawsuit resulted from a previous EPA effort to clamp down on older power plants, an effort that the Bush administration has now sharply curtailed.

The Tampa asthma summit drew officials from the CDC, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and state and regional health and environmental agencies from Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

-- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright