via Pixabay
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1 in 13 people have asthma - but we are three times more likely to die from asthma compared to whites.
Philadelphia is one of the most asthmatic cities: 13% of the city’s children have asthma, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. The prevalence of this disease reflects the history of major urban cities in America...
“Due to the Great Migration, millions of African Americans moved from the rural south to the urban north from about 1910 to about 1950, to places like Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia,” Ijeoma Kola, a researcher who studies asthma in Black people, said. “That exposed a lot of African Americans to various environmental, housing, and social issues that we now know affect asthma.”
Because of residential segregation, many of us live in neighborhoods with bad housing, air pollution, and nearby industrial waste, transportation sites, and busy streets and highways.
Asthma is a chronic disease that shows many of us STILL live in poor conditions - we need to see this as a social justice issue in which we must fight to remediate such conditions!