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Ed Yeates Reporting"If that's going to make a difference in them, and that's what's going to keep them healthier, then let's do it."
What's happening inside your kid's lungs when our air turns sour? How Utah children breathe on good and bad air days is now being registered in a computer as part of one of the most comprehensive pollution studies yet.
Like the Wasatch Front, Utah's Cache Valley has real pollution problems when inversions close in. That's why Greenville Elementary in Logan is continuing what Hawthorne Elementary in Salt Lake began last year.
As a selected school working with the State and Bear River Health Departments, and USU, searchers are documenting what Carmen Sorenson already sees in her daughter, even before an official yellow burn day.
Carmen Sorenson, Mother: "I can pretty much tell by looking at her. Her skin turns pale because she's having a harder time breathing. Her eyes get a little bit darker."
Carmen's daughter has asthma. So does her son. Both stay indoors at recess during yellow and red burn days, but today, because the air is good, Emily goes out. But not before she plugs her nose and blows into a hose, attached to a computer that every day now will track lung performance.
Following the baseline test, the kids come out here to play. No restrictions on time. This is a normal recess. They do whatever they want to do. Then, they go back inside for the follow up test.
Edward Redd, M.D., Medical Director, Bear River Health Dept.: "This study may actually give us enough information that we can say, you know, when the level is 35, it's not safe to go outside. That's something we might find out, even for kids who don't have asthma. But that's why we're doing the study. We really don't know."
But know they will, hopefully, when the studies end. Researchers will monitor lung performance in kids not only for outdoor air, but the air inside the schools as well.
