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Asthma And Violence Essay

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What’s Violence Got to do with it? Introduction Over the last decade, we have seen an increase in inner city children with asthma. In fact, there is a large disparity between inner city children and non-inner city children with asthma. A survey taken of 23,065 children, ages 6 to 17 at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center showed that inner city minority children are at a higher risk of having asthma (about 20%) compared to the non-inner city white kids (about 10%) in this study. The obvious question is what is the connection between inner city children and asthma? Some explanations could be lower incomes which means a shortage of medical resources or pollution levels, which are greater in urban areas. These are some of reasons for inner city children with asthma but according to research violence may also have something to do with this disproportion. Violence is seen as a reason for the severity of cases seen in inner cities. The research has shown that violence and asthma are in some way correlated. Although there are many studies to back this argument, it is still weak. The connection between asthma and violence is a feeble one at that, the argument lacks any real research. It is …show more content…

Violence is also a widespread problem in urban areas and as stated before there are studies that back the claim that violence is associated to the number of children with asthma. “The rising trends in asthma prevalence among children and youths who live in urban settings have recently been attributed in part to exposure to community stressors such as violence.”(Swahn and Bossarte 2006: 802). It is blamed/ given the responsibility of being a cause for the higher occurrence of asthma. While violence does happen in the same or even higher numbers in urban areas as asthma, it does not indicate that there is a relationship between the

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