Environmentalist special interests run the sleaziest attack ads in the business, as has been noted before on this blog, and also by my colleague Marlo Lewis. It doesn’t matter if you are a Republican (like Sen. Scott Brown) or a Democrat (like Sen. Mary Landrieu)—if you don’t toe the green line, then environmentalist advocacy groups will go for your jugular. Almost always, these enviro organizations try to pin an allegation of child abuse on those with whom they disagree. Classy!
Case in point: The American Lung Association’s tasteless new television ad campaign, which I’ve posted at the end of this blog. Here’s how the ALA described the spot in a press release:
The ad…features a red baby carriage with sounds of a child suffering respiratory distress that are heard while the red carriage is seen in front of iconic D.C. landmarks including the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol. The voiceover of the ad states the following: “Congress can’t ignore the facts. More pollution means more childhood asthma attacks. Log on to LungUSA.org and tell Washington: Don’t weaken the Clean Air Act.”
There are several problems with this campaign. For starters, the American Lung Association suffers from a huge conflict of interest. The point of the ad is to protect the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate under the Clean Air Act. Left unmentioned by the narrator is the fact that the EPA is a major funder of the ALA, having delivered more than $20 million over the last ten years. As my colleague Myron Ebell noted, “So the EPA pays the American Lung Association, which in turn lobbies against a bill that would rein in EPA.” Many Americans labor under the misapprehension that the ALA is staffed by disinterested MDs in white coats; in fact, it employs partisan shills.
According to the advertisement, “More pollution means more childhood asthma attacks.” This claim is simplistic to the point of being disingenuous. For thirty years, asthma rates in the U.S. have been increasing, while pollution has been on the decline. From 1980 to 2009, ambient American air concentrations of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone decreased 78 percent, 48 percent, and 30 percent (respectively). Yet the prevalence of asthma increased 75% from 1980-1994, and asthma rates in children under the age of five have increased more than 160% from 1980-1994. Moreover, the number of people with asthma continues to grow. One in 12 people (about 25 million, or 8% of the population) had asthma in 2009, compared with 1 in 14 (about 20 million, or 7%) in 2001. (All of the asthma data was lifted from the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology.) The truth of the matter is that asthma is poorly understood. The ailment appears to have a number of triggers. Clearly, “pollution” isn’t the driving variable. Otherwise, asthma rates would have declined in lockstep with decreasing ambient air concentrations of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone.
If viewers go to lungusa.org, the website plugged in the American Lung Association television ad, they can sign an online petition demanding that their representatives “defend and protect the Clean Air Act.” It might surprise you to learn that I agree with this–I wholeheartedly believe that the Congress needs “to defend and protect the Clean Air Act”…from the EPA, whose politically driven war on domestic energy production is making a mockery of the law as it was written by lawmakers. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the EPA’s global warming power grab. In order to placate the President’s environmentalist base, the EPA has seized the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, despite the fact that the Agency lacked a Congressional mandate. In the words of Rep. John Dingell, an author of the Clean Air Act, “This [using the Clean Air Act for climate change mitigation] is not what was intended by the Congress.” He further warned that the EPA’s decision to regulate greenhouse gases invited a “glorious mess,” one that is already underway.
One of every 10 American children and 1 of every 12 of all Americans now has chronic asthma–in other words, it’s becoming an epidemic. Prevalence of the condition has been steadily rising since 2001 among all demographic groups, but particularly among blacks.
Horse hockey. Decreasing ambient air concentrations of pollutants and particulates resulted from modification of measurement and reporting protocols imposed during the Bush administration, not from any actual reductions.
On a bad air quality day, you can’t even see across the Grand Canyon. (Which, by the way, republicans have recently attempted to open up to commercial uranium mining. )
Years ago, over 70 years ago, my dad had asthma.
His doctor at the time told him it was all in his head.
He got over it.
Today we have whole cultures inside America that have remade themselves as victims.
When I read how high asthma is among blacks I wonder about it being all in their heads.
What an easy way into freebie medical care and out of physical exertion.
Now blacks really do have medical issues.
For instance, the number of Americans newly infected with HIV remained stable between 2006 and 2009, but infections rose nearly 50 percent among young black gay and bisexual men!
Prison sex?
What else explains so many in one sub-population falling prey to a completely preventable disease?
Blacks represent 14 percent of the U.S. population, but they accounted for 44 percent of new HIV infections in 2009.
HIV infection rates among blacks were nearly eight times higher than rates in whites.
Hispanics, about 16 percent of the population, accounted for 20 percent of new HIV infections in 2009 — a rate that was nearly three times as high as that of whites.
Men who have sex with men, represents 2 percent of the overall U.S. population, but they accounted for 61 percent of all new HIV infections in 2009.
Totally preventable.
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That asthma ad is reprehensible.
I lived through the times in the 1950’s and 1960’s when the smog was so think you could be in Pasadena and still not see the mountains!
(The mountains start in Pasadena!)
The air is so improved here in SoCal it isn’t even an issue.
Today is a hot summer work/commute day.
Yet I can see the mountains 50 miles inland and also see the Santa Catalina Islands, 25 miles offshore!
Comrade greg, how about providing proof of what you claim about asthma?
As for AZ, I live there genius. Most leftists like you have no clue as to why we have the problems we do with air pollution. As for the mining, so what? They USED to mine uranium there you idiot.
Please choose another site to bukkakke with your stupidity.
Greg, you are wrong. I am a physician (pediatrician and neonatologist, by specialty). Asthma rates have been rising in spite of the decrease in air pollution. There is significant medical data that points to asthma rates increasing because kids don’t exercise, and sit indoors playing videogames all day, rebreathing the same stale indoor air all day. Kids who go outside and are active do not have the same rates of asthma. (To be fair, this is a correlation, not a causative relationship.) Immunology is a tricky field, but there is also significant evidence that kids are kept in such sterile environments from the time they are born that their immune systems become hypersensitive to antigens that normally would not induce the immunologic cascade of bronchospasm and increased pulmonary edema (aka ‘asthma’). The other issue regarding the rates of asthma is that they are based on ICD-9 and CPT coding, which includes patients who have a single episode of bronchoreactivity in the asthma column – when they may simply have had a case of bronchitis. Happens all the time, especially when mom comes in and demands the newest and most expensive new combination steroid/beta-agonist inhaler medication she saw on a commercial when watching “The View”. The doc has 10 minutes to examine, diagnose and treat the child, and doesn’t have the time to try to educate the mother as to what is really going on, because he has a waiting room full of other mothers with sick children. It’s easier to simply give her the Rx for advair, bill for treating asthma, and send the mother and child on their way, knowing that the viral bronchitis will clear up on its own in a couple of days, and the mother won’t be coming back for an advair refill if her child doesn’t have recurrent symptoms. (Incidentally, this kind of pressure to meet unrealistic expectations is one of the reasons I chose to go into critical care medicine instead of general pediatrics.)
Sorry for the rambling nature of this post….I keep having to go AFK to treat patients here in Afghanistan.
Thank you doctor, as a youngster into my early twenties my episodes increased with Chicago/Minnesota cold weather but never happened while visiting Florida. All houses have allergens; animal dander from dogs and cats, house dust, rodents, cockroaches plus stuffy dry heat can cause in house attacks which is different from lung seizing up temporally from running sports. I played football and baseball but hated track and soccer because my wind just wasn’t fit for those activities.
where do EPA TAKE THOSE 20 MILLIONS TO GIVE TO ALA, TO PROMOTE THEIR PUBLICITY,?
LET ME GUESS, THAT IS THE POCKETS OF THE AMERICANS.