How does wildfire
smoke affect the risk of lung cancer? And how does this compare to things like
secondhand
cigarette smoke? Well, here is what you need to know.
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When wildfire
smoke turned the skies of the San Francisco Bay Area red in the summer of 2020,
Dr Kari Nadeau, a physician and scientist at Stanford University, thought about
the people who were most vulnerable. She worried about the workers at local
wineries who raced to protect their harvest and the children who lived near
refineries and breathed in pollutants every day.
During that
August, September, and October, she watched the air quality routinely reach
unhealthy levels for anyone without a mask. At the time, Nadeau said in a
public panel that being outside and breathing that air was similar to smoking
seven cigarettes a day.
But now she
believes that the health effects of breathing heavy wildfire smoke are probably
worse.
“Cigarettes at
least have filters,” said Nadeau, who directs the Sean N. Parker Center for
Allergy and Asthma Research at
Stanford University.
While cigarette
smoke, even secondhand, has been proven to cause lung cancer, wildfire smoke
has not. Some limited studies published in the last few years have found
correlations between people exposed to wildfire smoke and lung cancer. But none
have proved causation, the scientists who performed those studies have said,
and much more research is needed.
“We don’t know a
lot about the long-term health effects of forest fires,” said Scott
Weichenthal, an assistant professor in the department of epidemiology,
biostatistics and occupational health at McGill University in Montreal. Until
recently, fires have been studied as one-off disasters, he said, and we do not
understand how heavy, sometimes recurring short-term exposures to smoke can
affect people’s health down the road.
Experts do know
that, even in the short term, particle pollution from wildfires — including
tiny bits of ash, dust and soot — can worsen heart problems, reduce lung
function and aggravate asthma. In this way, wildfire smoke can affect health in
similar ways as diesel exhaust or smoke from cigarettes.
Wildfire smoke
can also include heavy metals like lead and arsenic, and hazardous chemicals
like benzene and formaldehyde gas, all of which are present in cigarette smoke
and can cause cancer.
What the smoke
contains, and the potential health risks it may bring, will in part depend on
what the fire consumed. Smoke from burning trees and vegetation will present
different dangers than that from burning houses, cars, electronics, or
toolsheds.
Wildfire smoke
is also temperamental; it literally blows away with the wind. The harmful
substances fires carry can be fleeting and hard to characterize, Weichenthal
said. And it can be challenging to measure the extent to which people are
exposed.
But as wildfires
intensify because of climate change, growing larger and spreading faster,
researchers have recently begun focusing on people exposed to smoke and fires
over extended periods of time. Experts from the University of California, Davis
are following survivors of the 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County, California. And
at
McGill University, Weichenthal was part of a team that analyzed about two
decades’ worth of Canadian public health records to better understand the
health consequences of wildfires, motivated in part by record fire years in
Ontario and British Columbia.
“It shouldn’t be
shocking to us that we would see some sort of elevated cancer risk in these
places,” he said. “We know that the chemicals that are being released are
carcinogenic.”
Weichenthal’s
study, which was published in The Lancet in May, found that those who lived
within about 30 miles of a wildfire in the last decade were about 5 percent
more likely to develop lung cancer, and 10 percent more likely to develop brain
tumors, than people living farther away.
While the study had some
limitations, Weichenthal said, these findings are “important because so many
people may be exposed.”
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