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AP: Bad Air Afflicts Blacks -- 79 Percent More Likely Than Whites to Reside in at-Risk, Polluted Areas

Posted on: Thursday, 15 December 2005, 09:00 CST

By David Pace Associated Press

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 attacks that often sent them rushing to the emergency room.

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.

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 risk scores were developed. "If you look at where our industrialized facilities tend to be located, they're not in the upper middle class neighborhoods."

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.

In 19 states, blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to live in neighborhoods where air pollution seems to pose the greatest health dangers, the analysis showed.

Nearly half of Missouri's black population, for example, and just over half of the blacks in Kansas live in the 10 percent of their states' neighborhoods with the highest risk scores. Similarly, more than four of every 10 blacks in Kentucky, Minnesota, Oregon and Wisconsin live in high-risk neighborhoods.

And while Hispanics and Asians aren't overrepresented in high- risk neighborhoods nationally, in certain states they are. In Michigan, for example, 8.3 percent of the people living in high- risk areas are Hispanic, though Hispanics make up only 3.3 of the statewide population.

Leflore County, Miss., ranked fourth among the ten counties that had the highest potential health risk from industrial air pollution in 2000, AP found.

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Local Reaction

Dr. Nnamdi Anosike, Rust College associate sociology professor: "Small towns are likely desperate to replace jobs lost to outsourcing and therefore community leaders and mayors overlook the dangers posed by long-term exposure to particulate air pollutants when they bring in 'dirty' industries."

Dr. Bryan Williams, University of Tennessee Health Science Center associate biostatistics professor :

" Environmental hazards represent just another burden to communities that are already disproportionately affected by unemployment, inadequate health care, or crime. "

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Source: Commercial Appeal, The

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