It will take years to unravel the depth of the long-term health impact suffered by Harvey survivors, but we know a lot of children will be affected. Rice University psych professor Dr. Christopher Fagundes says this first anniversary is going to be mentally hard for them especially.
"At the one-year anniversary specifically, you see people having a much harder time; meaning showing signs of depressive symptoms, poor sleep quality, and anxiety."
Dr. Fagundes says immune systems are compromised by highly stressful life events:
"When you're young and you're predisposed to something like asthma, you can imagine that your asthma symptoms are going to be much worse ... When that's combined, you can imagine, with certain environmental factors that we know occurred because of Harvey - toxins in the air and such - in those specific neighborhoods we're almost certain we're going to see an uptick in that."
A new report finds 8.3 million pounds of pollutants were released into the air during harvey. Not much data is available yet to fully evaluate the health impact of Harvey, but indications are young people who were directly affected are at higher risk for asthma, and older residents for COPD.
Nearly one in three area residents say their lives are still disrupted by last year's storm.