Daily HealthBeat Tip

Stop and go and wheeze

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I�m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Living closer to car, truck and bus exhaust seems to affect how a baby breathes. A new study finds more wheezing among infants who live near stop-and-go traffic. Researcher Patrick Ryan of the University of Cincinnati says that�s within about a football field�s length of a bus route, or a state road with a posted speed of less than 50 miles an hour:

"The infants that resided within the stop-and-go exposure category wheezed the most frequently, with 17 percent of them reporting wheezing, compared to the infants that were unexposed to all types of traffic, who wheezed only approximately six percent." (13 seconds)

Ryan says wheezing is an indication, although not a certainty, that the infant might develop asthma.

His study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Learn more at www.hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: November 4, 2005

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