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NCER News Item
Friday,
July 2, 2002
Grants Awarded for Research on Childhood Asthma
NCER
Staff Writer
WASHINGTON (NCER) - EPA
recently awarded more than $600,000 to two universities for economic
research in understanding the benefits of reducing asthma in children.
Childhood asthma has been increasing across the country. At the
University of California/Berkeley, researchers will investigate
how much a household is willing to pay to decrease asthma symptoms
in its children. The studies focus on understanding the benefits
to children in reducing ozone pollution and helping parents minimize
the risk of asthma in their families. Scientists at Research Triangle
Institute in Research Triangle Park, N.C., will study two sensitive
subpopulations - young children with and without asthma. By surveying
the daily activities and schedules of stay-at-home parents with
children younger than nine years, researchers hope to determine
the behaviors parents use to reduce asthma symptoms in their children.
This information will be used to estimate the amount of activity
time that children lose outside on days with high pollution, and
the value of this lost time. Scientists will work with asthmatic
children, ranging in age from six to ten, who live in a section
of Fresno County, Calif., to determine how households change their
behaviors to minimize asthma symptoms and how much these changes
cost.
For more detail on these two grants please refer to the abstracts
of these projects:
The grants were awarded through EPA's "Science to Achieve
Results" (STAR) program, which funds research grants in numerous
environmental science and engineering disciplines through a competitive
solicitation process and independent peer review. For information
on EPA's STAR program, visit: http://es.epa.gov/ncer/grants/.
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