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Kerry’s lie about asthma
Kerry said in his speech: “25 percent of the children in Harlem have asthma because of air pollution.” This is untrue. Children in the rest of New York City are breathing the same air that’s in Harlem, and they don’t have the same incidence of asthma. No, according to the New York Times, the principal cause of asthma, which is largely a disease among Hispanics in East Harlem and the South Bronx, is “indoor air pollution, in particular dust mites, cockroach feces and body parts, and rat and mouse urine.” In other words, the air pollution that makes children and adults in Harlem sick is air pollution in their own apartments. It is not “society” that makes them sick, but the unclean conditions in their own homes. And it’s factors like this that make Kerry’s promise to institute national health care and thus conform our health care system to Europe’s, a project so loved of liberals, totally unrealistic for this country. America, unlike Europe, has vast numbers of culturally backward people who have very low standards and do not take care of themselves and whose resulting disproportionate health problems would render a national health service ruinous.
[Adam Nossiter, “Asthma Common and on Rise in the Crowded South Bronx,” New York Times, September 5, 1995].
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