Asthma in the District of Columbia
Name:
Institution:

Authors Note
Introduction
One of the most common public health issue in Washington’s District of Columbia is Asthma. This condition affects mostly children and almost 12% of the children in the District suffer from asthma. During the late 1990’s, numerous children died from asthma each year. Asthma is a chronic disease that causes inflammation and swelling of the airways. It affects around 8.2% of children in the United States. Asthma attacks have led to 750,000 emergency departments’ visits and 200,000 hospitalizations each year. In fact, it is the leading cause of hospitalizations in children. In the United States, direct costs incurred from asthma related issues is approximated …show more content…
Research has shown that numerous social problems are tied to family poverty and these include poor health, violence, low school performance and teen parenthood (Estrada and Ownby, 2017). Statistics show that in the year 2016 18.6% of people in the District lived below the poverty line. Children generally have immune systems that have not become developed enough and as such they are generally vulnerable. Therefore, poor rental housing and inability to pay for hospital treatments due to poverty has led to the disproportionate asthma issue in the District. One of the asthma triggering factors is fumes from automobiles. Many housing facilities that are closer to the highways are pocket friendly to the poor people and their children and hence they prefer such house regardless of the dangers associated with living in such areas. In general, poor families often live in substandard and overcrowded housing projects, they also suffer from malnutrition which has a negative effect on the general health of an individual and lack access to quality health care. All these contribute to poor health of individuals especially children and this is why asthma is a concern at the …show more content…
Nothing could be further from the truth especially when patients come from a poor background. Poor patients are known to have more than one healthcare provider due to lack of insurance. This makes it difficult to implement an asthma management plan. A food suggestion would be to enact a policy where asthma patients are required to produce a file documenting the history of their condition. That is, a file documenting when they noticed the symptoms, then they were diagnosed and what hospitals they have visited. Since patients often lie, healthcare facilities in the District could come up with a central digital database containing details of asthma patients where all healthcare facilities would be required to update the database