Wildfire pollution widens asthma inequities on Long Island

Wyandanch is a proud, resilient community on Long Island. There’s about 13,000 people who live in this predominantly Black and brown hamlet. In early June, it celebrated its 55th annual Wyandanch Family Day. Hundreds of people lined the streets to watch a parade complete with floats, marching bands, and dancers. It was a blue, nearly cloudless day — much different than the hazy orange skies a few days earlier.

Wyandanch, like much of the northeastern U.S., has been impacted by heavy wildfire smoke blowing in from Canada. But what made this particularly distressing for this community is that Wyandanch has some of the highest rates of asthma and the highest rate of pediatric asthma ER visits on Long Island. Asthma is exacerbated by poor air quality, which can be caused by smoke and industrial pollution. And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021, Black children died from asthma at more than seven times the rate that white children did.

In this episode we speak with Latesha Walker, a longtime Wyandanch resident and school board member, and her 12-year-old daughter Christina who has asthma. We also talk to Monica Kraft, an asthma expert and a professor of medicine at Mount Sinai Health System who tells us about the science of asthma and the impact that environmental pollutants may contribute to it. We end the episode by interviewing Isabella Cueto, STAT’s chronic disease reporter, who provides insight into health inequalities associated with the wildfire smoke.

You can subscribe to “Color Code” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, and elsewhere. New episodes will be released every other Monday.

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Read more on some of the topics discussed in this episode:

• The Canada wildfires are exposing the harmful effects — and health inequities — of air pollution, STAT
• Read the Wyandanch Case Statement that Latesha Walker helped author in 2021.
• Why are the asthma rates in Wyandanch so much higher than in surrounding areas? Self Magazine
• Inequities to air quality in New York, Times Union

This podcast was made possible with support from the Commonwealth Fund.