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Asthma is now the leading cause of emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and missed school days in New York City ’s poorest neighbourhoods. Urban asthma is frequently described as one of America ’s fastest growing Epidemics . The epidemic is particularly acute among poor, African-American and Latino children living in urban neighbourhoods. While the national prevalence of childhood asthma in 1999 was approximately 7% for all children under 15 -years old, African-American children living below the poverty line were 15–20% more likely to have Asthma . In large urban areas, the prevalence of asthma is even more severe. For instance, in New York City 17% of children have experienced Asthma -like symptoms at some point in their lives . Children living in poor New York City neighbourhoods bear the heaviest burden of the disease and are three times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma as children who live in wealthy neighbourhoods. Asthma is the leading cause for emergency room evaluations, Pediatric hospitalizations, and school absenteeism in New York City . Numerous factors are believed to be behind the distribution of urban asthma. Residential exposures, including environmental tobacco smoke and in-home allergens common in poor quality housing, such as mold and cockroach Allergens , are consistently associated with the development and exacerbation of Asthma . While traditional asthma epidemiology has focused on individual and family level risk factors, many of the suspected contributors to asthma (both its onset and triggering once one has the disease) have contextual or neighbourhood effects. Neighbourhood physical characteristics frequently associated with asthma include poor housing quality and disproportionate environmental Pollution burdens regularly found in Low-income , minority urban neighbourhoods. While asthma hospitalization data are limited because they tend to reflect who seeks emergency treatment and do not necessarily represent asthma prevalence, these are the only asthma data currently available at the neighbourhood scale for all of New York City . Using childhood asthma hospitalization rates for the years 1997 – 2000 aggregated by US Census tracts, we analyze the relationship of asthma hospitalization rates and socio-demographic factors, neighbourhood housing quality, and environmental exposures such as polluting facilities, noxious land uses, and mobile-source air pollution. The purposes of the study are to identify, using Geographic Information Science ( GIScience ) techniques, New York City neighbourhoods with consistently high asthma hospitalization rates (some of the highest rates ever recorded in the United States ) and analyze some of the neighbourhood-specific hazards, including housing and environmental exposures, frequently associated with urban Asthma . REFERENCES
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