What would you do if you saw a child choking for air? Most of us would try to help.

Sadly, tens of thousands of children in New York City with asthma choke for air every day, in all five boroughs, and our elected officials are doing far too little to help them.

While asthma affects New Yorkers in every neighborhood, it affects many more people in low-income communities of color. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Health has found that asthma rates in Bushwick and Williamsburg are 400% what they are in the city as a whole.

The real tragedy of asthma, though, is that it could be prevented. Even in cases where asthma is difficult to prevent, the disease is treatable.

"Fighting to Breathe: Asthma in Bushwick," a report released earlier this week by the Wyckoff Heights Medical Center and the community organization Make the Road by Walking, demonstrates that the city is failing to prevent and treat asthma in low-income communities.

Among the primary findings of the report is that most New Yorkers who suffer from asthma live in unhealthy housing. Of the 300 asthmatics who were interviewed, an astounding 69% reported living in cockroach-infested apartments. Sixty-seven percent said they had excessive dust in their apartments, and 47% had rat or mouse infestation problems. One out of three asthmatics reported mold in their apartments.

All of these housing conditions are clear violations of New York City's housing code. Nonetheless, the City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) is renowned for failing to get slumlords to fix housing code violations, even the most serious ones.

A study by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development showed that tenants have to wait an average of one year before landlords fix housing code violations that the law requires be fixed within 24 hours. Similarly, a recent study by the tenant advocacy coalition, Housing Here and Now, showed that of the 1,533 buildings that were on HPD's Major Problem Building List in 2003, almost a third had even more "immediately hazardous" violations in 2005 than in 2003.

Unfortunately, HPD's failure to enforce the housing code means that tens of thousands of New Yorkers who suffer from asthma, and other respiratory ailments, live in apartments that are riddled with asthma triggers. According to Bushwick resident Veronica Acosta, "We are forced to live in unhealthy homes because irresponsible landlords refuse to fumigate and make necessary repairs to our old buildings. Even after taking our landlord to court four times, he still refuses to repair our apartment."

The report also shows that a great majority of asthmatics in Bushwick improperly treat their asthma. An alarming 59% of Bushwick residents do not use any preventative medicine to control their asthma.

In addition, the study shows that 48% of asthmatics treat their asthma attacks in the emergency room, and that one out of four asthmatics does not understand how to use their asthma medications correctly. This confusion can have dreadful consequences.

One Bushwick resident, Sonia Mangual, recalls, "They only told me not to use more than three tubes of Albuterol for my nebulizar after I went into a coma for 45 days because I had used too much Albuterol!"

The federal, state and city governments must combat this public health crisis by allocating significantly more resources to expand asthma education and treatment services. That, coupled with improved housing code enforcement, would go a long way toward helping New Yorkers breathe easy.