Van to deliver asthma and allergy treatment to Lake County children; ‘There are significant barriers to accessing health care ... placed on some people’

Nearly 20 years after losing their son Christopher to an exercise-induced asthma attack while he was on a jog, Helen and Mike Redding’s vision to bring free, high-quality asthma treatment to children around Lake County is coming to fruition.

The Reddings, who founded the Christopher D. Redding Youth Asthma Foundation in 2013 to honor their son, unveiled a specially designed van on last week that will take asthma and allergy care directly to kids who need it.

Along with health care nonprofit partner Mobile Care Chicago, which will operate the van as it expands its operations into Lake County, the organizations expect to provide evaluations and treatments for thousands of children around the county.

“To see this van where we’re actually going to be able to reach more children, I think (Christopher) would just say, ‘Mom, thank you, you did it,’” Helen Redding said. “It’s part of our vision to have a mobile van, to do screenings, and we finally realized that.”

A star football player and three-sport athlete at Lake Zurich High School, Christopher Redding was home for a visit during his first semester at Drake University when he passed away from what was only the second asthma attack of his life.

“We resolved as a family that we would do all that we could to ensure no other family would suffer such a needless tragedy due to a lack of education about asthma,” Helen Redding told a crowd in downtown Waukegan on April 13. “Our mission is to educate, advocate and provide services for families and youth suffering from asthma, with a focus on lessening the adverse health effects on asthmatic youth and young adults involved in athletics within underserved communities.”

Redding said that community health surveys show that about one in every six Lake County households has a child with asthma, and that out of about 9,575 emergency room visits from 2016 to 2018, Waukegan, Zion, North Chicago and Round Lake saw the most asthma-related admissions.

Waukegan accounted for 30.5%, Redding said, while Zion accounted for 11.2%, Round Lake had 9.8% and North Chicago had 7.1% of the emergency room visits. She added that Black people in Lake County were about four times more likely to be seen in an emergency room due to asthma symptoms.

“We will address transportation and cost barriers faced by Lake County families, while providing no-cost, high-quality, culturally competent care by specialists on an ongoing basis,” she said.

The organizations project that between 200 and 300 patients can be served this year, and are hopeful that number will swell into the thousands as word gets around and care is maintained as children grow. For years now, the two nonprofits have partnered to bring mobile asthma vans around different Cook County locations, including churches, schools and health care fairs.

Mobile Care Chicago executive director Matt Siemer said the organization learned through a needs assessment years ago that northeast Lake County residents “overwhelmingly” lacked asthma and allergy health care options.

“If you’re in Waukegan, the nearest allergist practice to you right now is in Grayslake,” he said.

Consistently treating asthma is key to managing someone’s condition, he said, but it is oftentimes made more difficult by barriers outside of people’s control.

“That’s not because parents in Waukegan care less about their kids than other people, or because medications are less effective in this population than other people,” Siemer said. “The problem is there are significant barriers to accessing health care that are placed on some people that aren’t placed on other people.”

Funding for the service has been secured through May of 2024 via appropriations from bills passed by the Illinois General Assembly and supported by Lake County representatives, from private donations and by the Illinois Department of Public Health.

The organizations will continue to work to raise funds so the operation can continue for years to come, and Siemer said the effort has been years in the making because they, “wanted to make sure it was sustainable.”

He emphasized that a priority for Mobile Care Chicago is ensuring “access to convenient care” for the entire period a child is growing up, and said that the organization is now providing care for some second-generation patients after treating their parents for years.

A host of local political leaders attended the event, including District 9 Lake County Board member and Vice Chair Mary Ross Cunningham, D-Waukegan, who said her granddaughter has been dealing with serious asthma attacks; and Lake County Board Chair and District 13 member Sandy Hart, D-Lake Bluff.

“Through the whole of Lake County, we need it,” Cunningham said. “We have a lot of sick, asthmatic kids.”

Mike Redding said he made a mental note of everyone who came out to the event so he could invite them back to celebrate the van’s impact as it provides treatments.

“We’ve got to come back and share our future progress,” he said. “From today going forward, there’s going to be some good news and we’re excited.”

State Rep. Rita Mayfield, D-Waukegan, said that the Reddings and Mobile Care Chicago are, “doing transformational work here in the community.”

“When we talk about our children, we talk about asthma and we talk about having positive outcomes. This is something that can be controlled,” Mayfield said. “This is something where we can actually make a difference.”

State Sen. Adriane Johnson, D-Buffalo Grove, said the collaboration is, “critically important to our community.”

“We have so many environmental triggers that are causing and exacerbating the asthma in people here,” Johnson said.

The Christopher D. Redding Youth Asthma foundation also awards annual scholarships to high school seniors who are athletes and have asthma, and is accepting applications from Lake, Cook and the collar counties through the end of April.

Symptoms of asthma include shortness of breath, chest tightness or pain, wheezing, coughing and trouble sleeping.