Damar Hamlin PHOTO COURTESY OF FACEBOOK.COM HEART RHYTHM SOCIETY

Miami – After two student athletes, one in Miramar and the other in Connecticut, collapsed and died after suffering cardiac arrest last year, efforts by state and federal lawmakers were launched to place life-saving equipment in schools and sports practice fields and provide CPR courses.

Fourteen year-old Knox MacEwen collapsed and died after suffering cardiac arrest on Nov. 4, 2023 while running in Junior Reserve Officers’ Training 5K at Everglades High School in Miramar.

Fifteen-year-old Elijah-Jay Rivera, a high school football player in Connecticut, suffered the same fate in October 2023.

According to CT Insider, the teen died unexpectedly while waiting for football practice to start at Windsor High School and was pronounced dead at the hospital.

He died of sudden cardiac arrest, the news agency said.

Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) is a lifethreatening emergency caused by a malfunction in the heart’s electrical system or structure, caused by an abnormality from birth or one that develops over time.

According to the American Heart Association, Black children were more than four times as likely to experience out-of-hospital cardiac arrest as white or Hispanic children and were 26 percent less likely to survive hospital discharge.

The deaths of Rivera, MacEwen and other teen athletes who previously suffered sudden cardiac arrest became the rallying cry for nationwide medical emergency equipment and life-saving programs in all schools.

The U.S. Senate recently passed the HEARTS Act, which includes U.S. Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick’s bill, the Access to AED Act, to award grants to schools throughout the country to partner with nonprofit healthcare organizations to develop and implement a program to promote defibrillation access.

The grants can be used to purchase new CPR and AED equipment and provide training to students, staff, and volunteers in case of a sudden cardiac arrest emergency at school and practice fields.

“As a mom and member of Congress, I’m on a mission to expand life-saving healthcare tools to children nationwide by equipping schools with AEDs and training for cardiac emergencies,” Cherfilus-McCormick, a Democrat whose district covers portions of Broward and Palm Beach counties, said in a statement.

“By increasing access to these vital tools, we can protect our schoolchildren when disaster strikes. It includes my Access to AEDs Act, which increases survival rates from sudden cardiac arrests, allowing kids to return home safely after emergencies.”

Black kids are at a higher risk for sudden cardiac arrest due to family history, and the condition was higher in neighborhoods of lower socioeconomic status, whereas survival was higher in neighborhoods of higher socioeconomic status, according to the American Heart Association. Of 6,945 cases of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, 33 percent occurred in Black children, 11 percent in Hispanic children, and 31 percent in White children.

The legislation, which was signed into law by President Biden last week, has been endorsed by a lengthy roster of sports leagues and organizations including the American Heart Association, the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, the Women’s National Basketball Association, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, Major League Soccer and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, Who We Play For, the American College of Cardiology, American Red Cross, Parent Heart Watch, Simon’s Heart, Heart of the Game, Eric Paredes Save a Life Foundation and Youth Sports Safety Alliance/National Athletic Trainers’ Association and the National Alliance for Youth Sports.

The NFL saw one of its players suffer sudden cardiac arrest on the field during Monday Night Football in 2023.

Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed after making a tackle during a game against the Cincinnati Bengals.

Life-saving techniques including CPR and the use of a deliberator were administered on Hamlin on the field before he was transported to a Cincinnati hospital.

Doctors said the life-saving method and deliberator saved Hamlin’s life, who recovered and is currently starring on a Bills team that clinched a playoff berth.

However, the lives of MacEwen and Rivera couldn’t be saved.

According to reports, doctors pronounced MacEwen dead when he arrived at Memorial Miramar Hospital.

He was enrolled at the JROTC program at Western High School in Davie, Florida at the time of his death.

His mother was diagnosed with cancer months before her son’s death, and the family was still grappling with the lingering physical and financial effects of her illness, a GoFundMe said.

“The family has been through the unimaginable,” the GoFundMe said, adding the funds raised will “allow Knox’s parents, Kevin and Julie, to take time off work to grieve.”

According to Safe Beat, a company that promotes cardiac care devices and performs research to address sudden cardiac arrests, annually, nearly 600,000 Americans suffer from SCA.

More than 7,000 youth under the age of 18 suffer from SCA annually in the United States, with student-athletes being more than 3.5 times as likely to experience SCA as non-athletes.

Survival from SCA more than doubles when a bystander uses a publicly available AED as compared to waiting for an AED shock after the arrival of emergency responders.

Safe Beat said 20 children between the ages of 6 and 25 will die from sudden cardiac arrest in one day, with 7,000 each year.

Two thirds of sudden cardiac arrests occur in people without any prior indications of heart disease, and the sensitivity of an ECG/EKG for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy capable of causing sudden unexpected death in adolescents is 95 percent.

A majority of SCA cases the first symptom is the fatal collapse.

Sudden unexpected death is three times more prevalent in young athletes than non-athletes, and 1 in every 300 children has a pre-existing heart condition.

Many heart conditions are hereditary and some are not detected before kids suffer sudden cardiac arrest.