Search

To address asthma in the state, in October 2000, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) and the American Lung Association of Texas held a joint meeting of asthma professionals from across the state, with a primary purpose of identifying major issues and potential strategies and actions to be taken. These discussions became the basis of the 2001 Texas State Asthma Plan, which has since been adopted to guide state efforts in asthma surveillance, management, education, and advocacy. The primary purpose of this project, which was conducted with and funded by the DSHS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been to develop and implement an asthma surveillance program for Texas school-aged children. The program has been implemented with a sample (n=42,409) of students from the Texas Education Agency's region IV. An important goal has been to determine the feasibility of conducting school-based statewide asthma surveillance and assist with establishing a network for ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of asthma data. This project is expected to become part of a wider asthma surveillance network that will include mortality, hospital discharge, and Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data. It will also provide information not typically captured by surveillance programs, including the BRFSS, which rely heavily upon a previous diagnosis of asthma to determine both lifetime and current prevalence of asthma. Results from this project indicate that such reliance on a previous diagnosis may considerably underestimate the prevalence of disease--particularly in the Latino population.

To address asthma in the state, in October 2000, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) and the American Lung Association of Texas held a joint meeting of asthma professionals from across the state, with a primary purpose of identifying major issues and potential strategies and actions to be taken. These discussions became the basis of the 2001 Texas State Asthma Plan, which has since been adopted to guide state efforts in asthma surveillance, management, education, and advocacy. The primary purpose of this project, which was conducted with and funded by the DSHS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been to develop and implement an asthma surveillance program for Texas school-aged children. The program has been implemented with a sample (n = 42,409) of students from the Texas Education Agency's region IV. An important goal has been to determine the feasibility of conducting school-based statewide asthma surveillance and assist with establishing a network for ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, interpretation, and dissemination of asthma data. This project is expected to become part of a wider asthma surveillance network that will include mortality, hospital discharge, and Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data. It will also provide information not typically captured by surveillance programs, including the BRFSS, which rely heavily upon a previous diagnosis of asthma to determine both lifetime and current prevalence of asthma. Results from this project indicate that such reliance on a previous diagnosis may considerably underestimate the prevalence of disease--particularly in the Latino population., INTRODUCTION Despite increasing concern regarding asthma's threat to the public health, the United States has no comprehensive means of national asthma surveillance and the majority of states, including Texas, do [...]

The article presents a study of the ambient air pollution exposure and how will it affect the cardiopulmonary health of beach lifeguards. The ambient air pollution is one of the major problems worldwide, where its risks have caused several illnesses such as cancers, cardiopulmonary disorders, and even death. However, ambient air pollution has also been affecting several athletes, particularly the beach lifeguards where they are also exposed to this kind of air pollution and the result has made a comparison between the forced vital capacity (FVC) in the morning and in the afternoon.

The article focuses on project COAL (Communities Organized against Asthma & Lead/ Comunidades organizadas contra la asma y el plomo), which is funded as a factor of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Environmental Justice: Partnerships for Communication program. It says that the project seeks to teach parents on environmental health hazards, and gather population-based data on prevalence and location of asthma cases and homes with unsafe lead levels. Principal collaborators on the project are also mentioned.