Wildfires are increasing with climate change and their smoke can travel hundreds to thousands of miles, exposing distant populations to hazardous PM2.5. Records from EARLY-ADAPT, daily mortality from 32 European countries, and daily estimates of fire-related and non-fire-related PM2.5 from 2004–2022 were cross-referenced to quantify impacts. The analysis found an average of 535 deaths per year linked to wildfire PM2.5 across those countries during the 18-year period. Standard attribution methods vastly undercount these deaths, yielding about 38 annual deaths, due in part to assumptions that wildfire PM2.5 is no more toxic than traffic emissions.
Have you gone outside recently and smelled an acrid odor, perhaps accompanied by a hellish orange sky? Check the news, and you were likely downwind of massive wildfires like those in the Canadian province of Manitoba or the Florida Everglades- an increasingly regular event as millions of people find themselves in the path of noxious smoke, sometimes from a country away.
amid the ravages of climate change - and those who breathe in their smoke, even far away from the source of the blazes, are at far greater risk than scientists previously realized. As detailed in The Lancet Planetary Health journal, health data analysis shows that wildfire-related deaths in Europe have been underestimated by a whopping 93 percent, partially because the average person doesn't know that the smoke from these conflagrations can travel hundreds or even thousands of miles from the initial fire.
What they found was sobering: some 535 people on average died every year in those 32 countries from heart and respiratory conditions associated with breathing PM2.5 from wildfires during that 18-year time period. Using standard methods, which presumed that breathing in those particulates is no more toxic or deadly than carbon emissions from traffic - a misconception countered in a 2021 paper suggesting PM2.5 could be up to ten times deadlier - the mortality rate would only be about 38 people on average.
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