Health projects Our past projects have included a study of asthma in schoolchildren, and a program to reduce illness caused by contaminated drinking water.
  
Asthma study: Fifth-graders blow into peak-flow meters to gauge lung
capacity. |
Based at Ryan Elementary School, the study involved 95 fifth-grade students and their parents who answered questions about the child’s health history, home environment, and demographic and socioeconomic conditions.
Students recorded any symptoms in diaries, and took daily peak-flow measurements of their breathing for two months.
An educational program about asthma was designed for school nurses, teachers and the children.
Agua Para Beber: Untreated drinking water threatens the health of the 225,000 people who live in colonias in Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.
Colonias are underdeveloped, unincorporated subdivisions where about 90 percent of homes have no sewers or running water. Such services are unlikely for years so intermediate steps are being taken.
Under the name Agua Para Beber, Spanish for "water to drink," our center and a binational alliance of health agencies helped teach colonia residents how to treat their own water. Volunteer residents known as "promotoras," or health promoters, who live in the colonias, received training in water purification and hygiene education and helped educate other residents about how to chlorinate their drinking water and take other precautions against gastrointestinal illness.
The initial phase of the project, approved in October 1997, involved 500 families in the two Laredo cities. Each family received eyedroppers to chlorinate water, and a five-gallon receptacle to store the water they treated.
The program was inspired by one in El Paso, Texas, and its sister city, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The Center for Environmental Resource Management at The University of Texas at El Paso, which created the program in 1994, provided guidance in Laredo. The Environmental Protection Agency funded the project.
Partners in the program included the Texas Department of Health’s Office of Border Health, Primary Health Care Services for Webb County Colonias, and the Department of Health and asssistance of Nuevo Laredo, the Laredo Health Department and Texas A&M Community Centers for Families.
Environmental house calls: Under the pilot project titled "environmental house calls," STEER students were involved in making house calls, a hands-on method to learn underlying causes of asthma.
Families in Laredo with children who have asthma volunteer to open their homes to the students. Under professional supervision, the students visit the family home three times. They learn about the relationship between illness and the environment of their patient.