Via Nature News & Comment, Amy Maxmen writes: California biologists are using wildfires to assess health risks of smoke. Excerpt:
As the skies above the San Francisco Bay Area in California filled with smoke last week from wildfires ripping through nearby Sonoma County, Kari Nadeau and Mary Prunicki sprang into action.
The pair, scientists at Stanford University in the Bay Area, began calling in hundreds of people who had signed up to participate in their study of the long-term health effects of wildfire smoke. Previous research has linked air pollution from wildfires to surges in hospital visits for asthma and strokes. But it’s not clear whether exposure to wildfire pollution has lasting consequences — something that Nadeau, director of Stanford’s Sean N. Parker Centre for Allergy & Asthma Research, and Prunicki, a pollution biologist, hope to find out.
In early October, before the first large wildfires of the year sparked in northern California, their team assessed the circulatory, respiratory and immune systems of people enrolled in the study. The scientists began calling participants back to their lab on 28 October to undergo the same tests, which they’ll repeat in three months after the smoke has cleared. Nadeau and Prunicki have approval to continue assessments until 2037 and ultimately hope to enrol as many as 2,000 people — amassing a trove of data on how a person’s body responds over time to wildfire smoke.
Answers are sorely needed. Wildfires burned a record-breaking 760,000 hectares last year in California, destroying an area larger than the US state of Delaware. Almost 100 people died and hundreds of thousands of others breathed in sooty air for days. And climate models predict these blazes will grow larger and more frequent in the coming decades. The area burned in California each year will increase by 77% by the end of the century if greenhouse-gas emissions continue to rise, according to the state’s most recent climate-change assessment.
Lisa Miller, an immunologist at the University of California, Davis, says the Stanford study is one of the first to monitor wildfires’ health effects in a diverse group of people over several years. By understanding who is most affected by wildfire and why, Miller says researchers can create evidence-based guidelines for mitigating risk. She is particularly worried that smoke exposure could damage children’s lungs as they develop in ways that lead to chronic health problems.
“We have to be better prepared for these events,” she says. “Last year was everyone’s wake-up call that we need to be ready for the next big fire to happen — because it will happen again.”
