[ad_1]
When wildfires roar through a forest and bulldozers dig into the dirt to stop advancing the flames, they may turn more in the air than just clouds of dust and smoke. , according to scientists.
Those dark, puffy plumes of smoke that rise over heat waves during the day and sink into valleys as the night air cools down can carry countless living microbes that can infiltrate our lungs or latch onto. to our skin and clothes, according to a recently published study. In science. In some cases, researchers fear that airborne pathogens could make firefighters or downwind residents sick.
“We were inspired to write this because we recognize that there are many trillions of microbes in smoke that haven’t really been incorporated into an understanding … of human health,” said Leda Kobziar, scientific director of forest fires at the University of Idaho. “At this point, it’s really unknown. The diversity of microbes we have discovered is truly mind-boggling. “
As this recent fire season suggests, the need to understand what is in wildfire smoke that we can’t help but breathe and how it can affect us has never been more pronounced, but scientists say we are seriously behind the curve.
Wildfires burned over 10.2 million acres in the United States in 2020, according to federal statistics, including some 4.2 million acres in California, where more residents were exposed to smoke longer than ever before.
Smoke from wildfires now accounts for up to half of all fine particle pollution in the western United States, researchers say. While there are many studies on the long-term impacts on human health of urban air pollution and the short-term impacts of smoke from wildfires, little is known about the myriad of ways in which the latter can harm us in the course of life.
“Frankly, we don’t really know the long-term effects of smoke from wildfires, as the community’s exposures haven’t been long-term before,” said Dr John Balmes, professor of medicine at the ‘UC San Francisco and member of the California Air Resources Board.
But humans – and Californians in particular – should expect to inhale more wildfire smoke in the future.
Scientists say the planet will continue to warm for decades, even as humans suddenly act collectively to stop climate change. This warming and other factors are contributing to increasingly destructive forest fires. The state’s forests, on the other hand, are struggling to adapt, and native plants are displaced by faster-burning invasive species.
Add to those trends a global pandemic that attacks the respiratory system, and the fire smoke filled with microbes every year could be seen as a growing health risk, researchers say. They wonder if the microbes in the smoke from wildfires could make cancer patients more vulnerable to infections or make children with asthma more likely to develop pneumonia.
Scientists believe that some microbes survive and even proliferate in forest fires, where the heat burns the ground and leaves behind a layer of carbon that protects the microbes inside the earth from intense heat. Others survive in the air because particles from wildfires can absorb the sun’s otherwise deadly ultraviolet radiation, the scientists said. And other spores are probably spread by the wind currents caused by the fire.
Kobziar and study co-author George Thompson III, associate professor of medicine at UC Davis, said so far the link between microbes and wildfires has been anecdotal – like the firefighter trend foresters to fall ill with valley fever after working. on an incident. The disease is contracted by inhaling spores of the fungus genus Coccidioides.
“We have more questions than answers at this point,” Thompson said. “Our lungs are exposed to pathogens every day that we don’t think about much. But [what] if we increase the number of microbes in there with fire?
In 2018, for example, the Kern County Fire Department requested a grant of $ 100,000 to get help reducing fuel cuts – which disrupt the ground – because their firefighters would fall ill after doing the job. . Data shows that valley fever cases peak on the county valley floor each fall, just as the fire season is underway in the surrounding hills.
“Aerosols, microbes, spores or fungal conidia… have the potential to travel hundreds of kilometers, depending on fire behavior and atmospheric conditions, and are ultimately deposited or inhaled downwind of a fire,” said Kobziar and Thompson wrote in their article.
Yet it has been difficult to determine the pathogens present in the smoke from the forest fires.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and a team of chemists, physicists, biologists and forest and fire ecologists from a number of universities have worked together for years to study smoke from wildfires in the country, in assuming that no one will be safe from its effects. In the future.
“As the climate changes, as the temperature warms, as we build homes in places surrounded by human populations, and as housing development expands in areas susceptible to fire, it is a matter of time.” said Berry Lefero, director of tropospheric composition at NASA. Program, which includes a DC-8 airliner that circles the globe and studies forest fire smoke, ozone and aerosols in the lower atmosphere.
Through the combined work of these researchers, scientists hope that the public and healthcare workers can one day receive accurate and timely predictions about the destination of smoke from wildfires, the specific health risks that she poses and what people in her path should do Prepare beyond standard advice for staying indoors.
To solve the riddle of what microbes are in smoke and why, Kobziar and Thompson must understand what type of fuel burns, such as a grass, shrub, or tree; how many there were initially; how badly it was burnt (was it just black burnt or completely reduced to ashes or something in between?); and where the smoke comes from.
Once these variables are determined, there is the complicated task of capturing the smoke, which is by no means uniform, Kobziar said.
In September, Kobziar, a former firefighter, used a drone to capture air samples over Idaho when he was inundated with smoke from fires in eastern Washington and Oregon. . She then placed the samples in a petri dish, added food that the microbes like to eat, and waited to see what would happen.
“Even a few hundred kilometers from the source of the smoke, it was still significant,” Kobziar said. “We are still trying to isolate all the things that we have found.”
Tim Edwards, president of Firefighters Union Local 2881, which represents thousands of members of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, hopes the scientists’ work can bolster his own efforts to get respirators for wildland firefighters, as they usually only rely on masks or bandanas. – unlike their urban firefighting counterparts.
It’s not just the dust raised by a fire that is making crews sick, Edwards said.
“Now in a savage conflagration you have 1,000 houses on fire,” he said. “You burn the house down, you don’t know what chemicals they have in this house, everything that’s on fire that’s going into your lungs.”
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
Originally published
[ad_2]
Source link