As many as 40,000 people die in the US each year from breathing wildfire smoke, according to a new study. “Those are huge numbers,” Minghao Qiu told The Washington Post. Qiu is a professor at Stony Brook University. She led the study, published Thursday in the journal Nature. Qiu’s team found that the amount of time that wildfire smoke is present at dangerous levels in the air has gone up sharply for most of the US. So has the amount of tiny, toxic particles that people are exposed to. Those particles can invade the lungs. They can cause asthma, heart attacks, and other health complications. They are so small that they are measured in microns. An average human hair is 50-70 microns in diameter. Wildfire smoke particles are 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5). Between 2003 and 2019, the average amount of PM2.5 in the air in the US totaled roughly 100 micrograms per cubic foot. That number has run closer to 800 micrograms per cubic foot over the past five years, Qiu reports. During that time, wildfires have raged across the Western US and throughout Canada. Researchers used computer models to track wildfire smoke going back decades. They showed a clear link between climate change and the number of wildfires. The threat of breathing toxic smoke from wildfires will increase as temps rise, the study’s authors say. Marshall Burke told NPR that wildfire smoke is rarely listed as a cause of death. He's a Stanford University climate expert. "We see heart attacks or COPD or some other complication from chronic disease," he said. But, Burke added, research shows that breathing wildfire smoke makes a wide range of health conditions worse. Reflect: What is something in the environment that you think people should be paying more attention to and why?
