Blacks, poor more likely to breathe most unhealthy air

Chicago ? Kevin Brown’s most feared opponent on the sandlot or basketball court while he was growing up wasn’t another kid. It was the polluted air he breathed.

“I would look outside and I would see him just leaning on a tree or leaning over a pole, gasping, gasping, trying to get some breath so he could go back to playing,” recalls his mother, Lana Brown.

Kevin suffered from asthma. His mother is convinced the factory air that covered their neighborhood triggered the son’s attacks that sent them rushing to the emergency room week after week, his panic filling the car.

The air in the neighborhood where Kevin played is among the least healthy in the country, according to a little-known government research project that assigns risk scores for industrial air pollution in every square kilometer of the United States.

An Associated Press analysis of that data shows black Americans like the Browns are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger.

Lana Brown, of Chicago, says her son, Kevin, who suffers from asthma, used to gasp while trying to get some breath while playing ball near his home in the Altgeld Garden housing project on the city's South Side. A little-known government research project that assigns risk scores for industrial air pollution in every square mile of the United States says the neighborhood is among the least healthy in the country.

Residents in neighborhoods with the highest pollution scores also tend to be poorer, less educated and more often unemployed than those elsewhere in the country, AP found.

“Poor communities, frequently communities of color but not exclusively, suffer disproportionately,” said Carol Browner, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration when the scoring system was developed.

With help from government scientists, AP mapped the risk scores for every neighborhood counted by the Census Bureau in 2000. The scores were then used to compare risks between neighborhoods and to study the racial and economic status of those who breathe America’s most unhealthy air.

More than half the blacks in Kansas and nearly half of Missouri’s black population live in the 10 percent of their states’ neighborhoods with the highest risk scores.

Kansas was 27th in its overall health risk score.

Wichita – the state’s major manufacturing center – had 48 neighborhoods ranking among the worst 5 percent in the nation.

The neighborhood in Kansas with the highest health risk scores from industrial air pollution was in Atchison.