The White House Council on Environmental Quality, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently unveiled a Coordinated Federal Action Plan to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Asthma Disparities.
Nearly 26 million Americans are affected by this chronic respiratory disease, including 7 million children, especially minority children and children with family incomes below the poverty level. Asthma rates of African American children are currently at 16 percent, while 16.5 percent of Puerto Rican children suffer from the chronic respiratory disease, more than double the rate of Caucasian children in the United States. The annual economic cost of asthma, including direct medical costs from hospital stays and indirect costs such as lost school and work days, amounts to approximately $56 billion.
The action plan is designed to coordinate efforts to improve asthma management and prevention, including:
- reducing barriers to asthma care by ensuring that the populations most severely impacted by asthma receive evidence-based comprehensive care, which includes access to medical services, education, and environmental interventions;
- building local capacity by enhancing capacity to deliver integrated, community-based asthma care systems;
- targeting services to identify the children, families, and communities most impacted by asthma disparities; and
- accelerating prevention efforts to increase understanding of the cause or causes of asthma and test interventions that may prevent the onset of asthma.
For more on the action plan, please visit:
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment