Asthma Trap, Essay Example

Asthma is a disease that is running rampant among the youth of the United States today. While its causes are ostensibly environmental, macro-level social forces contribute heavily to what could be readily described as an epidemic. Low-income populations and certain ethnic groups are disproportionately affected because of their social condition, regardless of any genetic predisposition or active decision-making on their part.

“Asthma is…multifactorial,” according to professor Robert C. Strunk; he is refering in part to the myriad indoor environmental factors such as mold, paint, cleaning products and the tendency of modern houses to be more airtight, therefore sealing elevated concentrations dangerous chemicals inside the home. He also means a catch-22 strongly exacerbated by global warming: pollutants responsible for heating up the earth’s air (things like car exhaust), themselves hazardous to pulmonary health, increase the levels of natural allergens being released by plants such as ragweed and mold, and subsequently bond with these chemicals, making them doubly worse. These two significant environmental factors are directly related to rapid urbanization and therefore relatively recent; their huge effect on the American population is due to specific macro-level forces at play within society.

The amount of time children spend inside has increased consierably over the past several years, thanks to the advent of personal computers and videogames. Lowered activity levels contribute to weaker lungs, and more time spent inside is effectively more time spent exposed to the above mentioned indoor pollutants that are all too common. What time kids do spend outside is often no better if they live in a very urbanized environment.

African-American and Latino children have demonstrably higher rates of asthma than their Caucasian counterparts, and social scientists have traced this directly to the fact that a greater percentage of these ethnic groups live in lower income households (more likely to be exposed to indoor pollutants like mold, rodent droppings, dusty carpets etc) and that these households are often proximal to busy streets (making outdoor air quality just as bad). Financial hardship complicates asthma directly, because parents are unable to effectively change potentially detrimental living conditions (with new carpets, mattress covers, mold-free housing) and can barely cope with the medical costs incurred from the emergency treatment of the consequentially worsening asthma of their children.

Research has also demonstrated that people who have low levels of trust and support within their immediate community have higher asthma rates. If parents don’t believe their children will be safe playing outside and provide no regular alternative for physical activity, they unintentionally place their kids at a greater risk for asthma.

It is implicit in the above analysis that today’s America struggles to cope with and suffers because of the overall increase in asthmatic individuals, especially children. Most obviously, the overall medical cost of hospitalizing asthma patients is estimated at 3.2 billion dollars annually nationwide. While the disease is taxing the system, it wreaks equal havoc on individual families, who stay poor because they cannot cope with immediate and preventitive measures needed to mediate and reduce asthma symptoms. The natural causes of asthma and the social dimensions that perpetuate it are self-reinforcing, and without a structural rethinking of the medicare paradigm (for example the Asthma Vans in Chicago), this situation will only get worse.