Around 24,000 people die in the United States annually due to wildfire smoke, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.
Researchers from Harvard and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai noticed that most previous smoke research either focused exclusively on smoke’s acute impacts on human health or focused on specific timeframes rather than long-term effects. They instead looked into the association between annual exposure to fine particulate matter from wildfire smoke, which contains carcinogenic compounds and heavy metals, and county-level mortality in over 3,000 counties across the U.S, in the study funded by the National Institute of Health.
They found that wildfire smoke was responsible for ~24,100 deaths every year, with no evidence of a “safe” threshold of wildfire smoke exposure. The researchers also found that people with neurological diseases, like dementia or Parkinson’s, experienced the greatest increase in mortality when exposed to wildfire smoke. People with circulatory system illnesses, endocrine diseases and cancers saw the next highest increases.
“For all studied outcomes, the exposure-response curves generally showed an increasing trend as exposure levels rose, especially at higher exposure levels,” the researchers said in the study. “In addition, greater effects of wildfire smoke PM2.5 were observed in communities with a higher percentage of the population under 65 years old, in more rural areas, and during lower summer and winter temperatures.”
Previous research released in September estimated that the U.S. could see an additional 46,000 deaths annually by 2050. The additional deaths are primarily attributed to climate change, which is making already fire-prone regions in the U.S. hotter and drier.
“Because of the mortality effects we uncover at low annual smoke concentrations, we project large mortality burdens not only in heavy smoke regions but also in populous regions with low smoke concentrations (e.g., the eastern US),” the researchers said in the study published in September. “Similarly, we estimate substantial mortality increases even in the low warming scenario because of projected increases in low-level annual smoke concentration.”
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3 Comments
Okay, wildfire smoke kills 20k.
How many people are killed from prescibed burning smoke?
Only the people in low lying areas ? Where the smoke settles.
When I saw “climate change” in this piece, it lost all credibility.
Are you claiming that wildfires and smoke production will not increase in the future due to climate change?