MISSOURI CITY, Texas -- For Karen Coney’s kids, sometimes the outdoors can be their biggest enemy.

“Since I moved out here, their asthma has been much worse,” Coney, a Missouri City resident, said.

Five of Coney’s seven kids suffer from asthma.

The proof is in the piles of medications around the house.

Doctors at Texas Children’s told Coney that ground-level ozone can aggravate asthma.

“If it’s high, it can definitely trigger this problem,” Dr. Abramson said.

Elsewhere in the Houston area, parents like Coney have help.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has monitors spread out all over Houston, Galveston, Kingwood and Tomball that keep track of ozone levels.

That means they can issue accurate alerts when the air becomes a danger.  

But there are none in Fort Bend County.

But according to the TCEQ, they have monitors surrounding Fort Bend County, and they say that’s close enough.

TCEQ gets data from 8 monitors within 10 miles of Fort Bend County.

They said that gives them a fairly accurate representation of what’s happening there.

But not everyone is convinced.

“It does no good to track the edge of a storm,” Matthew Tejada of the Galveston-Houston Association of Smog Prevention said.

The GHASP put a monitor of their own in Fort Bend County.  They said the monitor showed higher levels of ozone than what was picked up on TCEQ’s outlying monitors over a three-day period. 

“For a county like Fort Bend that has so many suburbs, so many families and communities, they are the ones that should have the best,” Tejada said.

But the TCEQ stands by their monitor readings.

Because Fort Bend County doesn’t have a TCEQ monitor, 11 News asked the agency about the GHASP monitor in the area.  A spokeswoman from TCEQ said she couldn’t respond because she doesn’t know how GHASP does their monitoring.

Tejada said pollution from traffic and industry in Houston gets sucked back out to sea at night, and then blows right back into Fort Bend the next day.

But the TCEQ said they’ve only seen that happen on the eastern side of Houston.

Coney said having the monitors would give her peace of mind, since she’d know when she needed to keep her kids inside.

But for now, she will have to continue to rely on medicine and the hospital when asthma emergencies strike.