CALIFORNIA
FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JULY 9, 2024, OR THEREAFTER
BY
THOMAS D. ELIAS
“THE
PERNICIOUS CONTENTS OF WILDFIRE SMOKE"
The next
time authorities issue a smoke advisory telling residents of California
areas previously unaffected by wildfires to stay inside with closed
windows and doors until a smoke cloud passes by or dissipates, do it.
That’s the essential message
of an authoritative new study that appeared just as this year’s fire season got
started, the report indicating death tolls from smoke clouds loosed by past
blazes have been exponentially higher than previously reported.
In fact,
the number directly or indirectly killed so far by smoke turns out to be far
higher than fatalities from the flames themselves. It’s high enough to match
almost precisely the human costs of illicit fentanyl consumption. One
difference: the state now offers antidotes for fentanyl poisoning, but there is
no easy remedy for the unseen and previously unattributed toll of California’s
many fires.
Fentanyl
deaths have made lurid headlines, but smoke-related maladies and deaths are
sneaking up on Californians who usually regard inhaling smoke as a mere
nuisance.
It turns
out the health effects of wildfires are far worse than that.
So says the report just
published in the journal ScienceAdvances, published by the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, where UCLA researchers found at
least 52,000 persons died over a very recent 11-year period from effects of
tiny particulate matter left behind in their lungs after inhaling wildfire smoke
(https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adl1252).
That’s an
average of almost 5,000 persons per year felled by after-effects of fires
started by lightning, arsonists and criminally negligent utility companies,
which have already been forced to pay more than $15 billion for physical
damages from blazes caused by their faulty equipment.
The UCLA
research, from the Luskin Center for Innovation in the school’s Environmental
Health Sciences department, raises the suspicion that recent deaths may have
been even more numerous than the report indicates, because it covers only the
years 2008 through 2018, ending just as the severe wildfire epidemic of 2017 to
2022 was getting started.
“It’s
just a major issue at the climate-health nexus,” said Rachel Connolly, the
project director.
The
report says wildfires produce toxic types of particulates, some of them
carcinogenic, that can be up to 10 times more harmful to people than other
sources of air pollution like auto smog or smokestack emissions.
Very
small particles floating in smoke can affect both hearts and lungs, causing
illness, hospitalizations and premature deaths, wrote the researchers. This can
spur temporary problems like coughing, but also potentially fatal effects like
emphysema and lung cancer.
Some
scientists wonder if wildfires are behind a recent nationwide uptick in
adenocarcinomas formed in linings of the lungs, also known as non-small cell
lung cancers, in persons who have never smoked. The cause of this increase has
not previously been explained.
Dangers
from smoke-induced disease do not figure to reduce much soon, the UCLA
researchers imply.
What the
study calls “questionable wildfire management practices” can combine with
longer wildfire seasons to increase “chances of wildfires spreading…toxic
smoke,” the researchers said.
What’s
more, the tiny particles in smoke can threaten people living far from the
actual fires. When winds blew smoke clouds over urban centers like the San
Francisco Bay area, San Diego and Los Angeles during the last three years, some
people there got sick because the smoke does not lose its particulate content
quickly while it travels, the study indicates.
No one
knows yet precisely how many long-term illnesses will result from the palls of
smoke that hung over San Francisco and the East Bay hills both in 2022 and last
summer.
Which
gives rise to other questions: If serious illnesses that can take many months
to manifest arise a year or more after a smoke cloud has hung over a major
population center, are those who started the fires behind that smoke liable for
health care expenses of the affected? And how can patients prove the smoke
cloud was the direct cause of their health problems?
These are
dilemmas the courts, filled with judges and lawyers who never studied
epidemiology, will eventually decide. No one can yet know if their decisions
will be fair or even well informed.
-30-
Email Thomas Elias
at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most
Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,"
is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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