AHA Wants Highschoolers Trained in CPR

Aug. 26--In an effort to create "a generation of lifesavers," the American Heart Association is pushing for all Florida high-school students to learn CPR before they can graduate.

The requirement -- already adopted by 19 states, including most of those in the South -- is part of a long-term strategy to raise the now-dismal survival odds for victims of sudden cardiac arrest.

"We need to increase the number of people willing and able to respond when someone collapses," said Wayne Rich, chairman of the Greater Orlando chapter of the American Heart Association. "To me, this is a mom-and-apple-pie issue."

Just last week, a Lake Brantley High School sophomore used CPR training he had received in the school's elective first-aid class to rescue a woman in a car crash near the campus.

Jalen Lee was walking to school with two friends when he witnessed the crash and rushed to help. They pulled an unconscious driver from her car, draped her body over the hood, and Jalen began doing chest compressions.

"You could see she wasn't breathing," said Jalen, a varsity football player who wants to be an athletic trainer. "There were all these cars going by, but no one wanted to stop and do anything. I was nervous, but we had to do something until the ambulance came."

When the heart stops beating, chances for survival drop 7 to 10 percent with each minute that passes. And because blood stops flowing to the brain, even if the victim survives, the odds of permanent brain damage increase. CPR, or cardiopulmonary resuscitation, can keep blood pumping until medical professionals arrive on the scene.

Though it's impossible to say with certainty whether Jalen's action made the difference between life and death, AHA officials say such scenarios often save lives. And because many Florida schools already offer the type of training Jalen received, they argue that making it mandatory and expanding it to all students shouldn't be difficult.

The Florida Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment on the issue, but school-district officials in Orange, Osceola, Lake and Seminole had mixed reactions. Most were tentatively supportive.

"I'm very much in favor of students having that skill set and that information available," said Michael Blasewitz, executive director of secondary education for Seminole County Public Schools. "I would even go one step further and say the students should get some sort of wallet card that they could carry around [outlining the basic steps] -- some sort of takeaway from that experience. But we deal a lot with unfunded mandates from the Legislature, so the devil's in the details. I would hope that educators are involved in process of working those out."

Hands-only CPR training can take as little as a single class session, AHA officials say, and can be incorporated into existing health or physical-education courses. The heart association is not seeking for the students to become certified in CPR -- a longer and often costlier process that requires learning mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

"There is research that found that brief and ultra-brief demonstrations can be just as effective as more in-depth training," said Martha Lopez-Anderson of Ocoee, an advocate for mandatory high-school training and founder of the nonprofit Saving Young Hearts. In 2004, her 10-year-old son collapsed while in-line skating and died.

"We'll show people where they place their hands and how they do it, and a lot of times people say, 'Oh, that's it?'" she said. "It's not that hard."

Nationally, the AHA began urging states to require CPR training in 2011. At the time, only two states did so, but momentum has built quickly -- in large part because of the stakes involved.

"More than 420,000 people experience cardiac arrest outside of a hospital each year," said Dr. Dianne Atkins, a pediatrician who advises the AHA's Emergency Cardiovascular Care Committee. "Nine out of 10 of those victims die, often because bystanders don't know how to start CPR or are afraid they'll do something wrong."

The victims include young and old alike. In a single week this month, nine children and teens died of sudden cardiac arrest across the nation, Lopez-Anderson said. "And those are just the ones we know about -- the ones who made the news."

They don't include the Aug. 13 death of a 14-year-old football player from Indian River County, William Shogran Jr., who collapsed after vomiting during a training camp in North Florida. The cause of his death is still being investigated.

ksantich@tribune.com or 407-420-5503

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