by Michael Snyder, End Of The American Dream:
In modern times, we have never seen so many homes and businesses get burned up in a heavily populated metropolitan area in the United States. The fires in California have produced enormous amounts of smoke, and health officials are trying to alert the public to the potential dangers. More than 20 million people live in Southern California, but even those living hundreds of miles away could potentially develop serious respiratory problems as a result of breathing in this smoke. According to an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, wildfire smoke is “super toxic” to the lungs…
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The most dangerous component of wildfire smoke is fine particle pollution, also known as PM2.5 or soot. These tiny particles, smaller than one 20th the width of a human hair, can, if inhaled, become embedded in the bloodstream and lungs. It is estimated that about one-third of all particulate matter pollution in the US now comes from wildfire smoke.
“Wildfire smoke is super toxic to the lungs, more so than ‘regular’ smoke, because of the concentrations of fine particulates,” said Don McKenzie, an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.
When very small particles from wildfire smoke get embedded in your lungs, it can cause respiratory distress and a whole host of other health issues…
The cause for concern is, “the main component of smoke is particulate matter and that can penetrate deep into the lungs, which directly causes respiratory issues but it can also enter the bloodstream where it can cause a range of other health issues,” said Anne Kelsey Lamb, director of Regional Asthma Management and Prevention.
Wildfire smoke can be extremely harmful to the lungs of at-risk people who include, children whose lungs are still developing, pregnant women, older adults, those with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, chronic heart disease or diabetes, according to the American Lung Association.
Exposure to air pollution like wildfire smoke can also lead to the onset of asthma in otherwise healthy people, Lamb said.
What makes the current scenario that we are facing so much worse is that we aren’t just dealing with smoke from trees, plants and grass that have been burned.
Homes and businesses contain all sorts of highly toxic materials, and we are being told that those materials could “have toxic effects that we don’t really know at this point”…
Joel Kaufman, a professor of environmental health and medicine at the University of Washington, explained why a wildfire in an urban location such as Los Angeles is particularly hard to predict in terms of air quality effects.
“What’s a little bit different in this fire is that we don’t really know the toxicity of a fire that includes so much in the way of buildings that have burned and anthropogenic materials,” Kaufman said. “What’s burning in the businesses and in all the houses are not the same things that would burn in a forest fire. Some of what’s getting in the air can have toxic effects that we don’t really know at this point.”
In particular, experts are sounding the alarm about all of the plastic and all of the paint that has been burned up and released into the air by these fires…
Toxic chemicals from plastics, paint from the house and furniture are a few examples of what has been burned and is being released in the air, said Anthony Wexler, director of the Air Quality Research Center at UC Davis.
Researchers are still working to understand the relative toxicity of these specific chemical pollutants during a fire event.
Basically, we are facing a situation where giant mountains of toxic material have been burned up and are being breathed in by tens of millions of Americans.
According to Google, more than 23 million people live in Southern California alone.
Of course you don’t have to live in Southern California to be affected.
When massive wildfires erupted in Canada in 2023, it resulted in “a dramatic rise in emergency room visits” in the Big Apple…
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