I am 57-years-old. I suffered from asthma growing up outside of Philadelphia. I refer to it as growing up in an industrial area before the clean air act. My childhood and young adulthood were impacted by asthma attacks, hospital visits and significant illnesses. The medication I had access to was primarily rescue medication.
My second and last child was born premature following a significant asthma attack where I was hospitalized for 9 days. My daughter was impacted and has cerebral palsy and developed seizures. Her life is impacted forever, because of my asthma and illness.
The costs have been tremendous to the insurance industry and to our family. Because medications have improved over the years, my asthma is controlled. I never smoked, ate healthfully, exercised, hiked, kayaked and lived as normal a life as possible. However, my daughter will forever suffer with the medical disabilities that were a result of an asthma attack by her mother.
We do not have the air quality laws in place to sufficiently prevent asthma attacks. I believe asthma is a growing problem because industry continues to release pollutants. New extractive industries such as fracking operations are increasing throughout the United States and are not controlled by many of the environmental laws that were implemented in the 1970’s and 1990’s.
We must have clean air for good health. Do you breathe air? Do you want clean air? Then you must work for it. Then you must demand environmental regulation.
