“Please Kyla, stop running, you can’t run like the other children. You have to worry about your asthma.”
That’s what Kyla Peck’s aunt who babysat for her would tell her growing up.
This week is World Asthma Day. As we look at Kyla’s story, it is worth remembering that her story is all too familiar among the 27 million people living with asthma in the U.S. (about one in 12 Americans) — especially those living in cities like Chicago, where Kyla is from.
Kyla says, “My mother has told me about the countless experiences she has had with me in the hospital from an early age. One of the most memorable moments of me being in the hospital for my asthma came more recently. I was home in Chicago from college, maybe 20 years old, and I had a really, really bad asthma attack. I was hospitalized for maybe about 12 hours. Then I received the bill. Even after insurance paid their part, I owed about $500. I was in college; I had no money. It was my first experience dealing with the healthcare system knowing that I’d have to pay for my own care. It was stressful, not only having to navigate the asthma attack but having to learn to navigate my own financial situation living with this illness.”
A 2020 survey by Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and the Chicago Department of Public Health found that 16 % of Chicago families have a child who had been diagnosed with asthma. That is well above both the 11 % rate across Illinois and 12 %
rate nationwide.
Life in Chicago comes with exposure to an extraordinary number of asthma’s causes and triggers. Like in other large cities, emissions from gas-powered vehicles contribute heavily to overall air pollution. Chicago is a national crossroads of commercial transport by rail, road and airplane.
There is historically no shortage of power plant and industrial pollution, including fine particulate matter. Ground-level ozone, a major respiratory irritant, is a problem in the region (ozone is formed when certain industrial pollutants interact with the air). And the northern Midwest and Great Lakes region are heavily impacted by the smoke from Canadian wildfires that are more common each summer.
A lot of these triggers are problems for people all over the country. Last summer, smoke pollution from wildfires in Canada blanketed much of the U.S., including Washington, D.C., where Kyla now lives.
“The impact of that wildfire smoke from Canada was significant. It was so bad, I remember I was in my car and my eyes were burning. I was driving in my car with a mask on because I couldn’t breathe the air.”
The wildfire smoke is expected to return this summer. It will be especially bad for residents of Chicago and others in the upper Midwest. And experts expect this fire season to be even worse than last year’s because of “zombie fires” that have remained burning in Canadian forests throughout the winter under the snowpack.
