That’s what a Center for Disease Control and Prevention newsletter, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly, reported yesterday: 24.6 million Americans suffer from asthma, a 12 percent increase over the last decade.  One in every ten children has asthma and the prevalence increases with poverty – 13.5% of poor children have asthma; rates are highest for black children – one in six suffer from asthma.  This disease costs $56 billion each year when medical costs, missed school and work days and premature deaths are tallied.

The CDC report presents a mind-numbing flurry of numbers documenting the misery and suffering of millions of Americans, from the number of children rushed to the ER to how many school days they miss (and work days their parents miss).  What it doesn’t tell you is that air pollution is a major trigger for asthma attacks and can even cause asthma to develop in previously healthy people (also see this study).  Studies have documented how ER visits of children with asthma go up with pollution levels.

The good news is that there are plenty of steps that we can take to reduce air pollution.  EPA’s recently proposed clean-up standards for power plants alone would go a long way in improving our air quality so that asthmatics can breathe a little easier.  The standards would modernize power plants, removing millions of tons of air pollution every year and preventing hundreds of thousands of illnesses.  With one in twelve Americans suffering from asthma, this clean-up measure can’t come soon enough.

This article originally appeared on the NRDC blog, Switchboard.