Queens Village resident, Sharmila Abraham nearly lost her son Simon to an asthma attack three years ago that sent him to the emergency room. Now, Simon, 4, is about to start public school, but his mother is terrified that schools are unprepared to prevent her son from being rushed into the ER again.
“I’m trusting a stranger to take care of my child,” she said. “I nearly lost my son once; I don’t want to go through that again.”
U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who also has a 5-year-old son with asthma, announced a plan recently to help New York children suffering from asthma by arming schools and families with necessary preventative and emergency resources.
“All New York children deserve the opportunity to grow up strong, healthy and successful,” Senator Gillibrand said in a statement. “But too many of our children suffering with asthma do not have access to inhalers and other kinds of care they need.”
The plan includes funding more than $100 million worth of inhalers and spacers to low-income and high-incidence schools, funding for more training of on-site asthma educators, requiring schools to draft asthma management policies and programs and investing more in research and data collection.
Sharmila Abraham said “it only takes a second for something to go wrong” and having teachers trained to notice the signs of a potential attack and inhalers readily accessible could make a difference.
According to Gillibrand’s office, there are 370,000 children suffering from asthma in New York and an estimated 47,687 of them live in Queens. Between the years 2005 and 2007, there were 5,401 Queens children hospitalized overnight because of their asthma.
Senator Gillibrand pointed out that this means in Queens a little more than 10 percent of Queens children with asthma have been hospitalized overnight in that time frame. This is more than most areas in New York, like Dutchess, Hudson Valley that only had five percent.
“Part of Queens has tremendously bad asthma,” said Dr. Hadi Jabbar, who is the Pediatric Pulmonologist Director for the Pediatric Asthma Center in the New York Hospital Medical Center of Queens.
Dr. Jabbar listed Jamaica, Long Island City, eastern Queens and Rockaway as areas that have the worst case of children with asthma in Queens but noted that this is “a problem all over” New York.
Even though Jabbar has noticed an increased awareness about asthma, he said many of the children still don’t have access to proper care.
He also pointed out that children spend 6-7 hours of their day at school and properly managing children with asthma needs a “strong partnership” between schools, parents and doctors. He believes the senator’s plan helps promote this.
“It’s an excellent plan,” he said. “The more empowered the school system becomes the more helpful it is for physicians.”
Gillibrand hopes to attach this plan to the upcoming No Child Left Behind legislation because “it’s an education related bill.”
She also requested that U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius focus some of the money from the workforce development funding to train asthma educators.
When the money that would be saved is factored in, she said, “It’s not a considerably expensive program.”
According to Senator Gillibrand, asthma costs the United States over $16 billion each year through medication, lost school and workdays, urgent care and emergency room visits, and hospitalizations. For every $1 invested in asthma education, we save $7 to $36 in direct and indirect cost.
“This is something that every community suffers from,” she said. “We have a moral obligation to the children of this state to ensure their health and well-being.”
