Action Urged to Reduce Asthma Among Children

Orange County’s low-income residents, particularly Latino children, will continue to suffer from asthma and allergies at a higher rate than their peers if health care workers, school officials, community leaders and insurance companies don’t develop a collaborative plan to attack these illnesses, participants at a forum in Costa Mesa said Thursday.

The meeting, convened by the Latino Issues Forum of San Francisco and Latino Health Access of Santa Ana, was attended by 100 people whose jobs involve protecting children in Orange County. A 1999 survey of 5,000 Orange County households revealed that 18.5% of families have children who have suffered symptoms of asthma.

“There has been a huge increase in the incidence of bronchial asthma affecting all age groups, especially children,” said Dr. Paul Qaqundah, a pediatrician and professor of pediatrics at UC Irvine. “The quality of life for a child with asthma and the parents goes down a lot. The economic burden also is very high.”

Although the Orange County Health Needs Assessment did not provide ethnic breakdowns, health care and school officials said Thursday that Latino children are the most affected by the growing asthma problem. While reasons for the higher rates are unclear, some experts note that Latino children are more likely to live in areas with poor air quality or suffer from language barriers and lack of access to high-quality health care.

“Our air quality has improved, yet we have a lot of asthma,” said Pamela Austin, director of the Orange County Health Needs Assessment. “It could be that more people are diagnosed or that we are detecting it better. It’s not clear. But nationally, and it’s true here, those who live in poor areas suffer aggravated symptoms.”

Among the recommendations for curbing asthma rates in the county that were discussed at the forum are educational programs for parents who do not speak English or do not know how to access health care, increasing access to medical care and using schools as screening sites.

Teachers and other school staff members need to be trained to detect asthma symptoms because there are only 160 school nurses in Orange County to serve 480,000 students, said Linda Crawford, an Orange County school nurse practitioner. “To treat asthma better in the schools, we need more school nurses,” she said. “We also need to screen the children for asthma like we do for vision and hearing, and we need to have health care access for all children.”