Tacoma needs clean air for its children
Pediatric Nurse Nicole Makula writes from first-hand experience about the negative effect that pollution has on both children and adults.
I am a pediatric nurse, and along with almost 200,000 other Northwesterners, I live and work in one of the 31 most polluted places in the country: Tacoma.
The difference between me and my neighbors is that I see the effects of this pollution nearly every day – children and adults struggling with asthma, lung and heart disease, and even cancer.
It’s hard to see a child struggling for each breath when he should be running and playing with his friends. It’s even harder to know we could be doing more to prevent this problem, which affects tens of thousands of kids and adults in Pierce County. We received a wake-up call in October, when the Tacoma area officially received a dirty air designation from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. We have a serious problem on our hands and it’s threatening to get worse.
Studies clearly link air pollution to increased illness, hospitalization and death from lung diseases, heart problems and cancer. I understand the science behind how this affects different disease processes, but seeing it in real life is what really drives it all home.
Early on in my career, veteran nurses let me in on what I thought would be an old nurses’ tale: When you see soupy, smoggy, stagnant air out the window, admissions for asthma kids, “chronic lungers” and other ill children in severe respiratory distress go up.
Turns out, the old tale is true. I believe what I see, and there is painful evidence of these connections as I work with grimly ill children from all over Pierce County.
We rely on the state for fundamental protections for the health and safety of our families and communities. Right now, the state budget crisis is threatening to undermine the programs working to improve our state’s air quality. We cannot afford to lose the core functions of the environmental protection programs that provide the basic safeguards for our health and economic future due to cuts.
Our ability to tackle air pollution and its effects is being compromised by the economic crisis and its impact on our state finances. This is bad news for public health, and it’s bad news for our economy. The state Department of Ecology estimates the costs of illness and hospitalization relating to air pollution to be almost $190 million each year. In a time of tightened budgets, those are dollars that I am sure everyone would prefer to spend elsewhere.
As the legislative session gets under way, I urge Gov. Chris Gregoire and our legislators who are involved in budget decisions, including state Rep. Jeannie Darneille and state Sen. Debbie Regala, to continue to stand up for children and their future, and ensure that essential environment programs that protect the health of their constituents are preserved.
Our children deserve clean air to breathe. It’s that simple.
Nicole Makula is a registered nurse at Mary Bridge Hospital in Tacoma. Her views are hers only and do not reflect the official position of Mary Bridge Hospital.
