Project Katrina

Even before the storm, they were some of the country’s neediest kids. Now, the children of Katrina who stayed longest in ramshackle government trailer parks in Baton Rouge are “the sickest I have ever seen in the U.S.,” says Irwin Redlener, president of the Children’s Health Fund and a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. According to a new report by CHF and Mailman (direct link to PDF) focusing on 261 displaced children, the well-being of the poorest Katrina kids has “declined to an alarming level” since the hurricane. Forty-one percent are anemic—twice the rate found in children in New York City homeless shelters, and more than twice the CDC’s record rate for high-risk minorities. More than half the kids have mental-health problems. And 42 percent have respiratory infections and disorders that may be linked to formaldehyde and crowding in the trailers, the last of which FEMA finally closed in May.

The “unending bureaucratic haggling” at federal and state levels over how to provide services and rebuild health centers for the Gulf’s poor has made a bad situation much worse, says Redlener: “As awful as the initial response to Katrina looked on television, it’s been dwarfed by the ineptitude and disorganization of the recovery.”

More findings from the report (direct link to a PDF) that should make every single American sick to their stomach include:

• 55% of elementary school age children had a behavior or learning problem.
• 42% of children were diagnosed with allergic rhinitis and/or upper respiratory infection and 24% had a cluster of upper respiratory, allergic, and dermatological diagnoses. These high rates of diagnoses could reflect the harsh environmental conditions at shelter, such as exposure to formaldehyde which was found to be present in the trailers.
• 41% of children under four years of age were diagnosed with iron deficiency anemia. This is twice the rate for homeless children in shelters in New York City.
• 27% were diagnosed with a hearing or vision problem.
• Nearly one-half of the children required at least one specialty medical visit and 12% required two or more specialists.

Iraq was and is a terrible thing. And many folks tell me decades from now it is be the biggest failure of George Bush’s eight years in office. Well I beg to disagree, and studies like this just show how right I am.