Asthma: gasping at straws.

• Author: Fumento, Michael

A panicked father rushes into the hospital with his gasping, asthmatic child in his arms. "Help!" cries the boy's mother. "He can't breathe!" The ad, sponsored by the Clean Air Trust in affiliation with the American Lung Association, Public Citizen, Defenders of Wildlife, and the Sierra Club, was part of a lobbying effort to support the EPA proposals. So it's not hard to guess what the culprit is.

Taking their cue from President Clinton and his wife, who couch practically all their initiatives in terms of saving endangered children, proponents of the proposed EPA standards have done likewise. "When it comes to protecting our kids, I will not be swayed," EPA's Browner dramatically intoned at a recent conference on children's health.

The child card is repeatedly played: "Hundreds of scientific studies have shown that today's air pollution levels are shortening lives and harming children," claimed the Natural Resources Defense Council in a newspaper commentary. The ALA has young people with asthma testify at press conferences in support of the EPA's proposed standards. The Sierra Club is running radio ads that use little children's voices to push the EPA proposals, saying how stricter regulation will keep them from becoming sick.

Asthma is predominantly a childhood disease. Rates are indeed rising sharply among children. Many environmentalists say this rise is from air pollution and only the white hats at the EPA can stop it. Informing us that "More than 5,000 people die every year from asthma, three times the rate of just 10 years ago," Richard Wiles of the Environmental Working Group adds that "the Clinton administration proposed new health standards for ozone and particulates."

And who are the black hats? Syndicated New York Times columnist Bob Herbert asked readers to choose between "the kids with asthma who have a tough time breathing whenever there is a bad air day or the powerful representatives of the oil industry, the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, the American Bus Association, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, etc."

You can just picture some fat cigar-chomping businessman sitting on the chest of a poor little child gasping for air. The problem with that picture, though, is that as asthma incidence and deaths have been sharply rising, all the measured types of pollution - including particles and ozone - have been sharply dropping.

Further, studies have failed to show a relationship between even high air...