[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 14 (Tuesday, February 24, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H539-H540]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        ASTHMA AND AIR POLLUTION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New York (Mr. Serrano) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SERRANO. Mr. Speaker, in a week-long special series in New York 
this week, the New York Daily News is documenting what we in the South 
Bronx district that I represent have been saying for years: The 
concentration of waste treatment facilities and their fleets of diesel 
trucks are killing our children, our families, our older folks with 
asthma and respiratory illness.
  One-half million New Yorkers suffer from asthma. Six percent of the 
population. The worst rate in the country. New York City's asthma 
hospitalization rate is three times the national average. More than 
35,000 residents are treated at city hospitals for severe asthma 
attacks each year, a 24 percent rise over the last decade. Deaths 
accountable to asthma are up 50 percent since 1980. 284 died of asthma 
in 1995.
  The asthma epidemic hits children the hardest. More than 10 percent 
of New York City's one million students, 130,000, suffer from asthma. 
15,000 are admitted to the hospital each year, which is twice the 
national average. The hardest hit of all the children are those with 
families in the Hunts Point area of the South Bronx in my district and 
East Harlem in the district of my colleague (Mr. Rangel).
  New York City's asthma admission rates are highest in the Bronx, 
along with Harlem. Almost 13 percent of Bronx children under the age of 
17 were estimated to suffer from asthma several years ago. Children in 
poor New York City neighborhoods are five times more likely to be 
hospitalized than their better-off neighbors.
  Lincoln Hospital, the primary medical center in the South Bronx, 
recorded 14,300 asthma emergency room visits last year; 4,500 of these 
involved children. Lincoln Hospital now operates two, 24-hour emergency 
rooms devoted exclusively to dealing with the problem of asthma, one 
for children and one for adults. Eleven died there last year, more than 
double the usual number. The youngest was only 5 years old.
  Now, listen to this fact. There is a school in my congressional 
district where 30 percent of the children in Public School 48 in Hunts 
Point have asthma. Asthma threatens our children's chance of success as 
well. Asthma has become the leading cause of children who are absent 
among New York City schoolchildren.
  Now, while researchers debate the root causes of asthma and New York 
public health officials focus on every theory other than pollution, our 
communities continue to breathe foul air and continue to sicken and die 
from respiratory illness.
  Like neighborhood residents who spend their time dealing with these 
issues, take, for instance, a woman by the name of Lora Lucks, who is 
the principal at Public School 48 in the Hunts Point area of the Bronx. 
She blames the area's poor air quality. She says her students get 
sicker and sicker every year and that the air sometimes smells bad 
enough to make you sick to your stomach.
  Now, what is really interesting here is that 200 of Public School 
48's 800 students required emergency treatment last year at the same 
Lincoln Hospital.
  And perhaps the best test that something is terribly wrong with the 
air quality in that community is the fact that teachers that come from 
outside the South Bronx neighborhood, upon spending the 8 months or 
whatever time they spend in the school during the year, not counting 
weekends, they complain that the condition under which they live, their 
inability to breathe properly, the tearing of the eyes, the sick 
stomach, all the asthmatic conditions that prevail, happen not when 
they are living during the summer months outside the South Bronx area 
but only when they come into the South Bronx.
  Now, where could the problem be? Well, the South Bronx area of the

[[Page H540]]

Bronx now has over 40 sitings for waste transfer stations. One of the 
big mysteries in New York City is why one community got to the point to 
where over 40 waste recycling centers appear only in that community. 
New York City's Department of Sanitation currently licenses at least 85 
private waste transfer stations in New York City, handling at least 
13,000 to 14,000 tons per day of commercial solid waste.
  Today I begin to introduce this series which the New York Daily News 
has been working on all week long; and I will close with this, Mr. 
Speaker: 500,000 New Yorkers have asthma, the silent killer, and there 
is a child trying to breathe. This may look dramatic and some people 
may think in some way it is grandstanding by a newspaper, but this is 
the truth. This is a condition not in a foreign country. This is a 
condition in the Sixteenth Congressional District in New York.

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