Child asthma
impacts thousands of Akron kids
by Noor Hindi Above: Illustration by Chris Harvey. Not based on the likeness of the subjects in this story.
D
wight Slater describes his 13-yearold son’s asthma attack as one of the most terrifying moments of his life. In the middle of the night, Dwight could hear Mikhail gasping for breath, later turning blue as Dwight rushed to dial 911. For about 30 seconds, Mikhail stopped breathing. “It was the longest 30 seconds of my life,” Dwight says. “[Mikhail] was really scared.” Mikhail spent three days in the hospital, and that wasn’t the first time his life was interrupted as a consequence of his severe asthma attacks. In November 2018, Mikhail had an asthma attack at school and spent the day in the hospital after being transported by an ambulance. After this incident, Mikhail was placed on Akron Children’s Hospital asthma registry list, which includes 30,000 other children between the ages of 2 and 18 from Summit County and beyond. Of those 30,000 kids, about half are considered high risk, including Mikhail. The Asthma and Allergy Foundation
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of America (AAFA) has named 20 U.S. cities “asthma capitals,” or particularly challenging places to live if you have asthma. Five Ohio cities are on the list: Akron, Dayton, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus. Akron is ranked 14 out of 20. On par with national averages, Black residents of Akron are twice as likely to die from asthma as white residents, and in Ohio, Black children are more likely to have asthma than white children. This is due to poor social determinants of health, like living next to a freeway or other pollution source, living in an older home, or not having health insurance. Sam Rubens, Summit County Public Health’s manager of air quality and solid waste, says living next to a highway, which contributes to so much air pollution, is a big reason why Ohio’s numbers are so high. Dr. Cooper White, director of the Locust Pediatric Care Group at Akron Children’s Hospital, says respiratory viruses like the flu during Ohio’s winters cause an asthma burden for many kids.
“We always see huge bumps in our asthma frequency [during the winter],” he says. “There are socioeconomic factors, too. If you live in poverty and in inner-city areas, you’re much more likely to have asthma. These factors tend to be relevant in cities like ours.” Rubens argues that the numbers in Ohio are especially high because our cities have “really good hospital systems,” making people more likely to utilize them, which drives up numbers simply because Ohio would have more data than states with inferior hospital systems. Statistics from the AAFA support Rubens’ argument. All five Ohio cities on the list are ranked worse than average for ER visits for asthma but are average for the number of deaths and estimated asthma prevalence. No Ohio cities are ranked better than average in any marking. ASTHMA CAUSES SCHOOL ABSENCES, LIMITED SOCIAL ACTIVITY For the majority of kids living with asthma, Dr. White says their asthma does not severely impact their lives, and
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dying from asthma is rare. For example, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2007, of the roughly 250,000 children with asthma in the U.S., 10 of them died. This is not to underscore the severity of living with asthma. “You can go weeks without eating. You can go days without drinking. But try and hold your breath for more than two minutes and it’s all over,” Rubens says. Dr. White also says most kids have mild, intermittent asthma that requires occasional use of an inhaler. But for some kids, it can negatively affect their lives in big ways, causing an inability to interact with friends and attend school. “For the ones that are more affected with persistent asthma that’s not well controlled, oftentimes they have a chronic cough. There’s always that feeling in your lungs that you’re not well,” Dr. White says. “And nighttime cough, in particular, is a problem because it interferes with sleep. The ability to participate fully in life can also be impaired. These are the kids
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