Wildfire has become the smell and sight of summer in many locations throughout the United States and worldwide. What is it doing to our health?

In this episode of Learning More, we learn more about wildfire smoke and its effects on our health. We speak with Luke Montrose, an Assistant Professor of Community and Environmental Health, Boise State University.

Show Links:

Luke's department website.

Luke's lab website.

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Show Transcription (Automated)

Environmental Toxicologist

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[00:00:00] Russ: Wildfire has become the smell and sight of summer in many locations throughout the United States and throughout the world. What is it doing to our health? We learn more about wildfires and our health.

All right. Thanks for listening. And thanks for subscribing to learning more, where each episode, we bring you a new story about people, inventions, pop culture, and life. I'm Russ. And this week, I am joined by Luke Montrose. He's an assistant professor of community and environmental health at Boise state university.

Thanks for joining me, Luke. Thank you for that. I live in California, which many people call the golden state, but here in California, we know that it's actually become the orange state, at least over the last few years. It's like weeks of the summer are just filled with orange skies here from the wildfires and okay.

Yeah. Obvious. Problems with the wildfires are the homes that are being burned down the, you know, lives lost in this, but you've also got to start to think about what is this doing to me and to my health. So you're an environmental toxicologist. Can you tell us a little about that? And then we'll get into kind of what this is doing to each one?

[00:01:38] Luke:

Yeah. So environmental toxicology is broadly the study. Yeah. The world around us and how it interacts with our bodies causes biological, adverse reactions. So this could be anything from table salt, water, all the way up to cyanide. And so, I specifically study wildfire smoke and what that does from an acute standpoint.

So short-term exposures as well, as, as you've mentioned now, these long-term exposures being exposed for multiple months. And maybe even if you live in California for 50, 60 years, what is 50 years of being exposed a couple of months at a time?

[00:02:17] Russ: So what does it do

[00:02:18] Luke: so we have a wealth of information about what particulate matter does to our lungs and the rest of our body.

But what is particulate matter, and why is that different than wildfire smoke? So particulate matter is a very broad term. That essentially means anything that can be suspended in the air that you can breathe into your lungs. So that could be urban particulate matter. So think like car pollution industrial pollution coming out of it.

That could be silica dust. So you get that when you're in a farming environment or if you're driving down a dusty road, and then you also have a particulate matter that comes from wildfire smoke, and these do different things to your lungs. And we don't have as much information about wildfire smoke as we do about general air pollution, particulate matter.

But what we do know is that it's some particles are small enough that they get all the way into ours. And once they're there, they can call—all kinds of damage. And in particular, they can cause inflammation, and they can disrupt the natural immune response that your body is supposed to have.

[00:03:28] Russ: This makes me think instantly about secondhand smoke.<