H5N1

Doctors alarmed by surge in hospital visits as toxic smoke engulfs west coast

Via The Guardian: Doctors alarmed by surge in hospital visits as toxic smoke engulfs west coast. Excerpt:

A month after hundreds of wildfires started spewing toxic smoke along the entire west coast, doctors are seeing the alarming health effects of air pollution piling up.  

In northern California’s Stanford Health Care system, hospital admissions have jumped by 12% in recent weeks, including a stunning 43% jump in cerebrovascular conditions such as strokes. In Oregon, health officials reported nearly one out of 10 people visiting the emergency room had asthma-like conditions due to the smoke. And in San Francisco, doctors had to cancel their clinics for recovering Covid-19 patients, because the air was so unhealthy that just getting to their appointments could make patients more sick.  

A growing body of scientific evidence paints a dire picture of the effects of wildfire smoke on the human body. Experts told the Guardian earlier this month that the smoke can have an almost immediate effect on people’s health, causing asthma, heart attacks, kidney problems and even mental health issues to surge.

Now, as the west coast reckons with an unprecedented stretch of hazardous air, scientists and health experts are growing even more concerned about the immediate and long-term consequences of continuous exposure to the harmful pollution. 

In the Bay Area, despite firefighters gaining control of the nearest blazes started by lightning strikes in August, smoky conditions have persisted, turning the sky orange and keeping people inside their homes. 

“We’re on the 30th consecutive day of our ‘Spare the Air’ alerts,” said Kristina Chu of the Bay Area air quality management district on Wednesday. “That’s an all-time record,” she explained; the previous longest was 14 days.

LA wildfires smoke advisories continue; long-term exposure a concern

Via the Los Angeles Times: L.A. smoke advisories continue; long-term exposure a concern. Excerpt:

Smoke from the Bobcat and El Dorado fires continues to blanket Southern California, prompting the South Coast Air Quality Management District to issue its 10th straight day of advisories. 

Some residents of Los Angeles County, growing weary of the thick, hazy air, say they’re at wit’s end.  

“You can barely see to the end of the block,” Pasadena resident Stewart Pajares said Wednesday.  

Pajares said he felt burning in his eyes and lungs, and when asked what concerned him most about the region’s poor air quality, he said, “breathing.” 

Onshore winds will probably begin moving smoke out of the South Coast air basin Wednesday afternoon, the South Coast AQMD said, but “modest smoke impacts” from Northern and Central California fires are likely to persist. Current air quality readings are still lingering in the 150-200 range, which is considered unhealthy by the Environmental Protection Agency. 

EPA officials said they are working hard to keep people informed about the risks of the poor air.  

“We do need to learn to live with smoke,” EPA air resource advisor Katie Stewart said. “And it’s unfortunate, but we need to be smoke-ready every year.”  

Stewart said home improvements such as caulking windows and replacing worn-out weather stripping can help prevent smoke and poor air from entering houses. 

She also said residents with HVAC systems can set the air to circulate so it’s not being pulled in from outside, and recommended that people without those systems use portable air filters to create “clean air shelters” in one or two rooms of their homes.  

But after several days of smoky air, such filters are increasingly tough to come by: Local hardware stores have seen a run on customers looking for air purifiers. 

“We have some left,” said Rosie Gonzalez of Virgil Hardware in Glendale, “but it’s down to a really limited quantity.” 

Financial factors are also a challenge. Portable air filters — if you can get your hands on one — typically run between $100 and $150, Stewart said. That has left many low-income residents out of luck, particularly since the city’s smoke relief centers opened for only one day last week and haven’t reopened since.

AQI on Tuesday: Vancouver 171 (unhealthy); Portland 447 (hazardous)

We had a little rain last night, and it seems to have washed some of the smoke out of the air. But our air is still bad:

Meanwhile it continues to be worse than bad in Portland, according to AQI Portland Postal Bldg., Oregon, USA Air Pollution: Real-time Air Quality Index.

I hope the health services on the west coast have the time and resources to track morbidity and mortality from wildfire smoke. This will happen again.

AQI on Monday morning: Vancouver 228 (very unhealthy); Portland 468 (hazardous)

I just checked the AQI for Vancouver Second Narrows, which is not far from where I live, and it's the worst I've ever seen it:

Then I checked Portland Postal Bldg., Oregon, USA Air Pollution: Real-time Air Quality Index, and it's far worse than ours:

The public health consequences for the whole west coast, Canada and the US alike, are going to be serious.

 

AQI in Portland, Oregon: 507 (hazardous). COVID-19: 293 new cases, 6 new deaths

A screenshot from the Portland Postal Bldg., Oregon, USA Air Pollution: Real-time Air Quality Index:

And a September 12 update from the Oregon Health Authority:

PORTLAND, Ore. — COVID-19 has claimed six more lives in Oregon, raising the state's death toll to 505, the Oregon Health Authority reported at 12:01 a.m. today.

“Today's 500th death marks another sad milestone in the COVID-19 pandemic in Oregon," said Oregon Health Authority Director Patrick Allen. “These are our family members, our friends, neighbors and colleagues. We extend our deepest condolences to every Oregonian who has suffered a loss to COVID-19."

Oregon Health Authority reported 293 new confirmed and presumptive cases of COVID-19 as of 12:01 a.m. today, bringing the state total to 29,156.

Portland AQI: At 441, getting worse

A screenshot from the Portland, Oregon, USA Air Pollution: Real-time Air Quality Index:

By contrast, Vancouver Second Narrows is at 200 (very unhealthy), less than half Portland's. And our sky this evening has never looked worse in the 53 years I have lived here. The smoke is so thick the temperature has dropped sharply today.

I wonder what it's like in the ER's of West Coast hospitals tonight.

AQI in Portland, Oregon: 375 (Hazardous)

A screenshot from Portland, Oregon, USA Air Pollution: Real-time Air Quality Index.

This is what Beijing or New Delhi might endure in a bad winter. I hope someone is monitoring excess mortality in the western US and Canada. And firefighters need to be rotated out and replaced on a frequent basis, or they'll form a large fraction of that excess mortality.

AQI in Vancouver: Getting worse

A screenshot of Air Pollution in Vancouver: Real-time Air Quality Index Visual Map. It's decidedly worse than this morning:

Purple means "very unhealthy." 

 

The sun came up orange this morning, just like the smoky summer of 2017, and visibility is very poor. At least it's cooler than yesterday. We are looking forward to rain on Monday.

Smoke from wildfires can worsen COVID-19 risk, putting firefighters in even more danger

Via The Conversation: Smoke from wildfires can worsen COVID-19 risk, putting firefighters in even more danger. Excerpt:

Two forces of nature are colliding in the western United States, and wildland firefighters are caught in the middle.  

Emerging research suggests that the smoke firefighters breathe on the front lines of wildfires is putting them at greater risk from the new coronavirus, with potentially lethal effects. 

At the same time, firefighting conditions make precautions such as social distancing and hand-washing difficult, increasing the chance that, once the virus enters a fire camp, it could quickly spread.  

As an environmental toxicologist, I have spent the last decade expanding our understanding of how wood smoke exposure impacts human health. Much of my current research is focused on protecting the long-term health of wildland firefighters and the communities they serve. 

Air pollution and lingering COVID-19 damage 

People have long understood that the air they breathe can impact their health, dating back more than 2,000 years to Hippocrates in the treatise “On Airs, Waters, and Places.”  

Today, there is a growing consensus among researchers that air pollution, specifically the very fine particles called PM2.5, influences risk of respiratory illness. These particles are 50 times smaller than a grain of sand and can travel deep into the lungs. 

Italian scientists reported in 2014 that air pollutants can increase the viral load in the lungs and reduce the ability of specialized cells called macrophages to clear out viral invaders. Researchers in Montana later connected that effect to wood smoke. They found that animals exposed to wood smoke 24 hours before being exposed to a pathogen ended up with more pathogen in their lungs. The wood-smoke exposure decreased the macrophages’ ability to combat respiratory infection.  

Coronavirus research now suggests that long-term exposure to PM2.5 air pollution, produced by sources including wildfires, power plants and vehicles, may make the virus particularly deadly.

The eeriness of an orange sky, and the familiar lack of a climate crisis connection

In Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop writes: The eeriness of an orange sky, and the familiar lack of a climate crisis connection. Excerpt:

On Wednesday, the sky over the Bay Area turned orange. The visual was alien, yet the cause—rampant wildfires, accelerated by climate change—was very much a this-world problem. “Some folks said it felt like living on the next planet over, the red one,” Steve Rubenstein and Michael Cabanatuan wrote on the front page of yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle. “Others said it was like a solar eclipse, but longer, or the apocalypse, but less biblical.” Their story appeared under a banner headline, “SURREAL SKY, SURREAL YEAR.” 

A photo, spanning the width of A1, showed a passerby, clad in shorts, sneakers, and a medical mask, staring upward; behind him, the lights that typically illuminate the Bay Bridge at night were still glowing, because their sensors had been unable to detect the sunrise. Catherine Geeslin, a Bay Area resident, told the Chronicle, “It feels like the end of the world, or like Mordor.” 

The fires are not only in California—swathes of land are ablaze along the length of the West Coast. The flames have torched entire towns and killed at least fifteen people, seven of whom were found dead yesterday. In Washington state, more than 500,000 acres have burned; in Oregon, the figure is nearly double that. In California, more than three million acres are charred, including a patch of the Mendocino National Forest that now constitutes the biggest fire in the state’s history. Hundreds of thousands of people have had to evacuate their homes. As I wrote recently, that’s a complicated feat in the midst of a pandemic.  

The fires are life-changing, yet the story here is sadly repetitive. Some journalists who live out West have argued that the national press isn’t paying sufficient attention to their plight, particularly compared to the urgency in coverage of hurricanes that hit the East Coast. 

“I hate being ‘what if national media covered California like they cover New York’ guy,” Kevin Roose, a New York Times tech columnist based in the Bay Area, wrote on Twitter, “but if the sky looked like this in Brooklyn there would already be 142 essays and 17 commissioned TV specials about ‘our orange tomorrow.’” Roose’s colleague Charlie Warzel, who lives in Montana, asked, in a column, whether Eastern journalists would take fire seasons—and, consequently, climate change—more seriously if they had to experience the flames. 

Criticisms like these have irked staffers at outlets—the LA Times, for instance—that are covering the fires aggressively. And they have opened up other complaints: ProPublica’s Jessica Huseman, who lives in Texas, observed that the East and West coasts both enjoy an ample media presence compared to the middle of the country, where disasters, such as the recent derecho in Iowa, are frequently ignored by the national press. 

The reality is, of course, that there are national journalists doing strong work in response to the fires, yet the fires story hasn’t inspired a comparable media frenzy to, say, the one circling Bob Woodward’s new book. The problem is one of consistency and prominence. 

Which brings us to the importance of making a connection to the climate crisis. During California fire seasons in 2018 and 2019, I observed, in this newsletter, that despite some excellent, climate-centered enterprise reporting and editorials, major outlets were generally doing a poor job of integrating climate change into their quick-turn news stories. 

This year, the picture has been similarly mixed—this morning, the top headline on the Times’s homepage is “A Climate Reckoning in Fire-Stricken California,” yet other national stories, including in the Times, have failed to assert any climate link. In late August, CJR and The Nation’s Covering Climate Now project tracked notable instances of climate-free fires coverage; this week, Emily Atkin, who writes the climate newsletter Heated, pointed to more bad examples. 

Allison Fisher, of the progressive watchdog group Media Matters for America, reports that between September 5 and 8, ABC, NBC, and CBS collectively ran forty-six segments on the fires. Only seven mentioned climate change; Jeff Berardelli, a CBS meteorologist, contributed four of the seven, and ABC contributed none. PBS did a better job.