We're in the home stretch!

We’re in the home stretch for Asthma Awareness Day Capitol Hill 2010 (May 5) and I just finished a live televised segment with Chris Draft, NFL Linebacker, on WJLA TV. From there I dropped Chris at his next meeting and drove to my hotel. Room’s not ready so I’m sitting at the corner table of the restaurant facing Dupont Circle. It’s a perfect sunny day and the first chance I’ve had to notice all day.

You’d think after 13 years of hosting this annual event in which Congress listens and responds to issues affecting people with asthma and allergies that it would all be rather routine by now. And you’d be right --except that every single year something pops up that's unexpected.

Like the first year when we expected only one member of Congress to speak and 16 showed up! All of them spoke about their personal experience with asthma and allergies, and promised to help us address each of our issues. And they’ve proven faithful.

With their help, students with asthma can now carry inhalers at school, and in 46 states, they can carry their auto-injectable epinephrine if prescribed for anaphylaxis. With their help, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) no longer reimburses for illegally mass-manufactured nebulizer medications.

Each year is an advocacy success story that took a year or more of hard work prior to and following each event. I remember the year after September 11 and the anthrax attacks on Congress created a security snafu in which our event materials, signs, booth etc. didn’t arrive until after the Congressional briefing began. No matter -- our staff set up a fire bucket brigade line and silently loaded the room unnoticed by the audience. At the end of presentations, we invited them to the screening and fair, and as people turned around to look, there was an audible gasp of surprise: the room was transformed.

And so were the issues of access to specialty care, diagnostic testing and appropriate therapies as deemed by the patient/family and medical care provider.

Tomorrow we’re expecting 10 members of Congress to join us, most of whom have already signed up for the Great American Asthma Challenge pledging to do their part to eliminate asthma death and suffering in the United States. You can sign up, too! Just go to www.aanma.org and follow the Great American Asthma Challenge logo.

The Great American Asthma Challenge needs you! Right now, we have sections for families, medical care providers and legislators, but we’ll be adding sections for coalitions, working groups, volunteers – because this, as Chris Draft says, is a TEAM effort: Together for Effective Asthma Management.

Hope you can join us for the Congressional and Press Breakfast Briefing tomorrow morning! But if not, stop by the Allergy and Asthma Health Fair and Screening in Rayburn Foyer. It’s very easy to get to (just one block from the Capitol South stop on the Metro blue and orange lines) and you’ll get a FREE pulmonary functions test, exhaled nitric oxide test and consultation with an allergist – a $500 value, and you can take the test results with you! (Click here for more details.)

Okay, time to get ready – come what may, it will be another great Asthma Awareness Day on Capitol Hill!

Nancy