How concerned should you be about smoke exposure from wildfires?
Much is still unknown about the toll wildfire smoke takes on your health. But most adults and children with no preexisting conditions are likely to recover quickly from the effects of short-term exposure to the smoke that sweeps across the eastern United States, said Jeffrey Brook, an associate professor of occupational and environmental health at the University of Toronto. Dalla. Lana School of Public Health.
The smoke people have encountered this week is one of many exposures to pollution that our bodies will absorb over time, he said — it’s not likely we’ll be able to identify a health problem in the future and definitively pin it down. few days of wildfire smoke.
“The shortness of exposure during this period should not have significant long-term effects on the general population,” says Dr. Panagis Galiatsatos, a pulmonologist and critical care physician at Johns Hopkins Medicine. But there is limited data on how to assess the health effects of a “one-time big smoke burst,” says Mary Prunicki, director of air pollution and health research at Stanford Medicine’s Sean N. Parker Center for Asthma and Allergy Research.
“What happens to the person who has no outward symptoms from this brief exposure? There are probably changes in their bloodstream, but maybe that’s transient. We don’t really know,” she said. “If they don’t have any significant effects from the smoke acutely, they probably won’t have any long-term effects. But research has not shown that anyway.”
Isolating the long-term effects of wildfire smoke in general is difficult — it is difficult to determine what impact smoke exposure may have cognitive performance years later or other consequences, said Laura Corlin, an assistant professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. And we also don’t know the exact threshold for how much exposure is likely to have a long-term effect, said Dr. Raj Fadadu, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine who has studied the health effects of wildfire smoke.
What we do know is that even minutes of exposure to wildfire smoke can cause inflammation in the body, Dr. Brook said. Inflammation can lead to a cascade of downstream health effects; the longer it lasts, the greater the risk of cardiovascular problems and stroke. A few days or a week of increased inflammation is most likely not enough to lead to detectable health problems in the future, he said. “But inflammation is inflammation and it’s bad.”
We also know that the smoke from wildfires is particularly dangerous for people with underlying lung or heart conditions. Smoke can exacerbate symptoms of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It can put babies, children, the elderly and pregnant women at risk for serious health effects. Smoke also poses a significant risk fetuses. For otherwise healthy people with no pre-existing conditions, even brief exposure to wildfire smoke can lead to stinging eyes, irritated sinuses, wheezing, shortness of breath, headaches, itchy skin, and coughing.
If you go outside, wear a tight-fitting mask like an N95 and pay extra attention to your body for the next hour or so, said Dr. Emily Pennington, a pulmonologist at the Cleveland Clinic — watch out for symptoms such as a violent cough and tightness in the chest. If you have trouble breathing or chest pain, seek medical attention. Continue to monitor your health over the next few days and make sure you stay hydrated and get enough sleep, which can help you feel better, Dr. Corlin. And take every possible precaution to minimize your exposure level, which is to stay indoors as much as possible.