The Lancet. Focus on PM 2.5

 


The Lancet Planetary Health has devoted its latest volume, "Breathing Fire," to the growing threat of wildfire smoke, the dangerous PM 2.5 that threatens the health, perhaps even survival, of people around the globe. Is this a ticking time bomb?

The journal offers three core articles:

The first compares the health costs of wild fires versus fires deliberately set for fuel management.

The second examines the risk and burden of hospital admissions associated with PM 2.5 in Brazil from 2000 to 2015.

The final offering is an ambitious study of mortality risk of PM 2.5 inhalation that looks at data from 749 cities.



For this time series study, data on daily counts of deaths for all causes, cardiovascular causes, and respiratory causes were collected from 749 cities in 43 countries and regions during 2000–16.
During the past 3 years, wildfires have been observed in many locations of the world, including Australia, British Columbia in Canada, the western USA, and the Amazon rainforest.

1 For example, since the start of 2019, wildfires in California have burned more than 3 million acres, resulting in thousands of destroyed homes and businesses.

2 The wildfires in Australia have affected every state and destroyed more than 2000 homes and burned millions of acres.

3 Wildfires have both direct and indirect effects on health with potentially lasting consequences. Beyond direct injury, mental health can be harmed by the risks fires pose and loss of possessions and housing. The pollution from wildfire smoke can spread as far as 1000 km away and risk of wildfires is projected to keep increasing as climate change worsens.

Wildfire smoke is a complex mixture of particulate matter (PM) and gaseous pollutants.
4 Among the various air pollutants emitted by wildfires, fine particulate matter (PM2·5) is of great concern, as particles in this size range enter into the lungs and reach the alveoli where the small particles can translocate through the alveolar epithelium and enter the circulation.
 
Compared with PM2·5 from urban sources, wildfire-related PM2·5 tends to be more toxic due to its chemical composition and smaller particle size, and is often accompanied by co-exposure to other harmful environmental factors, particularly high temperatures.

In keeping with the theme of my posts today I'm left asking what our governments, federal and provincial, doing to help safeguard us from these mortal perils?  Here on Vancouver Island it has yet to develop as a regular problem. Air purifiers and masks seem to deal with it so far. But what about the interior of British Columbia, or the people of Calgary or others across the Prairies? What about Ontario?

What will be the mid-term and long-term effects on people who spend weeks or months every year living under smoky skies breathing this crap?  I recall some time ago reading a letter, I think it was in the Globe, from a woman in Calgary who said she and her husband were gathering up the kids and returning to Ontario to escape the dangerous PM 2.5 season.

This is a problem of potentially lethal dimension that afflicts a large part of our country. We expend great efforts to protect our communities from being consumed by wildfires but, as far as I can tell, virtually nothing to prepare those who live in these communities to cope with the threat to their lives.

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