Posted on September 24, 2015 by Lindsey Konkel in National Geographic National Geographic, By Lindsey Konkel Inside her dank and cramped apartment in a public housing project, Tai-Sheba Smith sometimes watches her 11-year-old son sleep at night. She worries that he’ll have an asthma attack in his sleep and stop breathing. Smith’s fears are more than just maternal angst: Manhattan’s gritty traffic exhaust can contribute to deadly asthma attacks and an array of other children’s health problems. In her neighborhood of East Harlem, kids are sent to emergency rooms for asthma nearly three times as often as kids in the rest of the city.
