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Subscribe to PrintBy Barbara Anderson / The Fresno Bee
Across the San Joaquin Valley, thousands of children start the day by inhaling asthma drugs. Many Valley doctors and parents blame dirty air for an asthma epidemic. [See and hear an animation of pollution's effects on the lungsy]More than one in five Valley children has asthma -- the highest level in the state. And researchers fear more than one in four children could have the chronic lung disease within the next few years.Fresno County is California's asthma capital: Nearly one in three -- or about 75,000 children -- have it, according to a 2005 statewide health survey. The estimate was 50,000 just four years earlier.Easier access to doctors in Fresno, the Valley's biggest city, could explain why so many children in Fresno County are diagnosed.Asthma causes a sufferer's airways to narrow and spasm, sometimes prompting a debilitating wheezing attack.Researchers are not yet ready to say dirty air causes asthma, but they know that dirty air stunts children's lungs and worsens asthma and bronchitis attacks. Ozone, the main ingredient in smog, rubs like sandpaper against delicate lung tissue. And particulates -- tiny bits of soot, chemicals and dust -- irritate and inflame lungs.San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District officials say they aren't convinced air quality can be entirely blamed for the Valley's skyrocketing childhood asthma rates.For one thing, the air is getting cleaner, says air district Executive Director Seyed Sadredin. So why are asthma rates increasing?Sadredin doesn't know, but he said it's possible that indoor air pollution, pollen or some other irritant could be the principal asthma triggers.Air pollution plays a role in asthma, Sadredin says. But "I think you're going to find out at the end of the day that air pollution is not the primary factor in increasing the asthma rates that we've been experiencing."Agriculture, the region's biggest industry, produces pollen by the ton. Allergies to pollen can trigger asthma attacks. But researchers have found hay fever and asthma rates are 16 times greater when people are exposed to pollutants at the same time they're exposed to allergens -- grasses, weeds, cat dander, smoke.And many doctors say there's little doubt that smoggy and sooty air increases the frequency and severity of asthma attacks that send gasping children to doctor offices and emergency rooms throughout the Valley each year. They even have a nickname for their patients' chronic coughs: Valley lung.Car and diesel exhaust, dairy farm waste, agricultural field dust, pesticides and industrial soot provide the raw ingredients for the Valley's dirty air. And geography and weather conspire to trap these lung irritants inside the bowl-shaped, 25,000-square-mile Valley."What we have here is kind of the perfect storm," says Dr. Michael Peterson, a Fresno doctor and president of the California Thoracic Society, the medical arm of the American Lung Association of California.Dr. John D. Gasman, a pulmonologist who treats adults at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fresno, noticed soon after moving from the Bay Area in 2001 that a lot of his patients had persistent coughs not caused by allergies.Breathing constantly irritated their noses, throats and airways."I'm quite certain it has to do with air quality here," Gasman says. "People that were fine elsewhere moved here, and it's this nonspecific, year-round sort of phenomenon."Alicia Bohlke, 41, of Merced has no doubt that dirty air affects her son.Continued on the next page >