Using CDC data to track asthma prevalence in five states with the most air pollution
Note from the Editor: This post is part of a series, written by students of the Spring 2019 Data Journalism I course in the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Each week we have a Data Fest in which two of the class reporters present a data set, along with a brief critique and overview of what they did and discovered.
As a health and science journalist, I’m interested in all the ways the environment affects our health.
As climate change worsens, we are already seeing health impacts, both mentally and physically. I wanted to look at asthma patterns in some of the more polluted areas in the country using Chronic Disease Indicators from the CDC.
The dataset was enormous so I decided to break it down by looking at just the top five states for air pollution based on the top five cities experiencing air pollution listed on The American Lung Association website. I broke it down further by only looking at asthma prevalence among women aged 18–44 years.
Breaking it down that way, I was looking at prevalence in Alaska, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.
The most recent asthma data available was from 2016, so I went back five years to 2011 to see if there was an increase in asthma in the most polluted states.
I calculated the percentage point differences between the previous years for each state, and the percentage point difference from 2011 to 2016.
From year to year, asthma prevalence varied, but overall from 2011 to 2016, asthma prevalence went up in Alaska, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, and down in California and Ohio.
Based on this information, I could look into what is causing the pollution in these states (for example, if they rely heavily on manufacturing and industrial work) and what the states might be doing to mitigate the effects of their pollution. Are there regulations in place allowing the states to become more polluted? Are companies following regulations? What are some of the other health effects in the area? I would also like to see what the asthma numbers will look like as we get further into an administration that is rolling back environmental protections.
The most difficult part of dealing with the CDC data was simply how large the dataset was. It made it difficult to share with others in its original form, and I wanted people to see the original data set, so they could check the data and come to their own conclusions.
*Kristen Ancillotti is a freelance journalist and graduate student in the class of 2019 at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She specializes in health and science journalism, using data-driven and interactive storytelling to share the news in a compelling way.
