New York, NY –
The first study of children from the World Trade Center Health Registry suggests more of them have asthma than children elsewhere in the nation. WNYC’s Fred Mogul has more.
REPORTER: The parents of 3,200 children were asked whether health professionals had ever told them they had asthma. The resulting asthma rate was about 50 percent higher than the national average for those who lived or went to school in the area of the World Trade Center, or were there on September 11th.
The study, however, has several limitations. It did not measure other co-factors for asthma, such as smoking in the household; it compared children's asthma rates with national and regional rates, not local ones; and it only measured their respiratory health as of 2003 and 2004, when the surveys were administered. A follow-up round of surveys is currently ongoing. For WNYC, I’m Fred Mogul.
Fred Mogul has been covering healthcare and medicine for WNYC since 2002. His beat takes him to hospitals, community clinics, doctors offices, health agencies, public schools and research labs across the metropolitan area. His work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Time magazine and Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.
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