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Health and medicine

Report: Blacks, poor more likely to face unhealthy air

CHICAGO - Kevin Brown's most feared opponent on the sandlot or basketball court while he was growing up wasn't another kid. It was the polluted air he breathed.

"I would look outside and I would see him just leaning on a tree or leaning over a pole, gasping, gasping, trying to get some breath so he could go back to playing," said his mother, Lana Brown.

Kevin suffered from asthma. His mother says she's convinced the factory air that covered their neighborhood triggered the attacks that sent them rushing to the emergency room week after week, his panic filling the car: "I can't breathe! I have no air, I'm going to die!"

The air in the neighborhood where Kevin played is among the least healthy in the country, according to a little-known government research project that assigns risk scores for industrial air pollution in every square kilometer of the United States.

An Associated Press analysis of that data shows black Americans like the Browns are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger.

Residents in neighborhoods with the highest pollution scores also tend to be poorer, less educated and more often unemployed than those elsewhere in the country, AP found.

"Poor communities, frequently communities of color but not exclusively, suffer disproportionately," said Carol Browner, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration when the scoring system was developed. "If you look at where our industrialized facilities tend to be located, they're not in the upper middle class neighborhoods."

With help from government scientists, the Associated Press mapped the risk scores for every neighborhood counted by the Census Bureau in 2000. The scores were then used to compare risks between neighborhoods and to study the racial and economic status of those who breathe America's most unhealthy air.

More than a decade after a 1993 plan to ensure equality in protecting Americans from pollution, factory emissions still disproportionately place minorities and the poor at greater risk, the Associated Press analysis found.

In 19 states, blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to live in neighborhoods where air pollution posed the greatest health dangers, the analysis showed.

Nearly half of Missouri's black population, for example, and just more than half of the black residents in Kansas live in the 10 percent of their states' neighborhoods with the highest risk scores. Similarly, more than four of every 10 black residents in Kentucky, Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin live in high-risk neighborhoods.

While Hispanics and Asians aren't overrepresented in high-risk neighborhoods nationally, in certain states they are. In Michigan, 8.3 percent of the people living in high-risk areas are Hispanic, though Hispanics make up only 3.3 of the statewide population.

The average income in the highest risk neighborhoods was $18,806 when the census last measured it, more than $3,000 less than the average for the rest of the nation. One of every six people in the high-risk areas lived in poverty, compared with one of eight elsewhere, the survey found.

Unemployment was nearly 20 percent higher than the national average in the neighborhoods with the highest risk scores, while residents there were far less likely to have college degrees.

Research over the past two decades has shown short-term exposure to common air pollution worsens existing lung and heart disease and is linked to diseases like asthma, bronchitis and cancer. Long-term exposure increases the risks.

The Environmental Protection Agency says its mission must focus on protecting all populations facing the highest risk.

"We're going to get at those folks to make sure that they are going to be breathing clean air, and that's regardless of their race, creed or color," Deputy EPA Administrator Marcus Peacock said.

Peacock said industrial air pollution has declined significantly in the past 30 years as regulations and technology have improved. Since 1990, according to EPA, total annual emissions of 188 regulated toxins have declined by 36 percent.

Still, "there are risks, and I would assume some unacceptable risks, posed by industrial air pollution in some parts of country," Peacock said.

For current air quality information, go to http://airnow.gov

[Last modified December 14, 2005, 00:15:15]