A Canadian woman is working for asthma control reform, believing children should carry their own emergency inhalers.
Sandra Gibbons, a woman living in Ontario, lost her 12-year-old son Ryan in October 2012. Ryan, who suffered from asthma, had an attack while playing soccer after school. The school did not allow the boy to carry an inhaler, and he blacked out and later died while his friends scrambled to get him to the principal’s office where his inhaler was being held. Now, over a year later, Gibbons is working to allow children to carry their medication.
According to Statistics Canada, over two million Canadians suffer from asthma and 40 percent of those people live within the Ontario borders. Data collected from the Asthma Society of Canada shows that around 500 people in the country die from this lung disease every year, and around 20 of them are children. Prohibitive policies, such as children not being able to administer their own medication when they might need it, only adds potential risk of fatality.
In Ontario, there is no province-wide policy regarding the use of inhalers. Because of this, schools treat the inhaler as they would any other type of medicine a student might need administered by a school official throughout the day. Many have criticized this approach as unnecessary and, in the case of Ryan Gibbons, life-threatening. Sandra Gibbons has started a petition that urges school boards to implement standard procedures for ashthma-suffering students, as well as calling on the government to support Ryan’s Law, which would make it legal for asthmatic schoolchildren to have inhalers on them at all times.
School districts in the United States have also struggled with this issue, but tend to lean toward allowing students to carry inhalers, provided they can manage the disease’s symptoms on their own.
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