Science / Medicine : ‘Alarming’ Rise in Asthma Among Blacks Reported

Inner-city blacks suffer disproportionately from asthma and there has been an “alarming” increase in the disease among them, physicians said last week.

For people with asthma, a chronic lung disease that can trigger severe breathing problems and even death, “the mortality rate for Afro-American males is four times that of whites, and for (black) females it is three times higher,” allergist Albert Sheffer of Harvard Medical School said at a meeting of the American College of Allergy and Immunology in San Francisco. In 1979, blacks were only about twice as likely as whites to die from asthma, he said.

“We had asthma hospital admissions increase from 1985, when it was about 9.5%, to almost 20% in 1988,” said allergist Frederick Leickly of Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. “Black children now represent about 80% of all asthma admissions, and 95% come from the city” though the hospital serves both inner-city and suburban populations, he said.

Sheffer estimated that 15 million to 20 million Americans have asthma, compared to a 1987 estimate of 10 million by the National Center for Health Statistics. More than half of these are black, Sheffer said.