Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, but it doesn’t always mean what we think.
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Updated: 15 hours ago
A year and a half ago, I had to issue a public health emergency declaration as a presiding health officer. It was for an air quality consideration secondary to a wildfire. It wasn’t the first time I’ve been involved in something like that. In fact, during my career, there have been a ton of those. What was different in this case was the justification and circumstance. Here’s what I mean.
This fire was in an area with limited citizenry under immediate contact threat. That was misleading. Fortunately, we had a really conscientious and professional air quality monitoring crew with the capacity to measure for ultrafine particulate matter, which had a much wider impact. That’s important because such monitoring doesn’t always happen. Not all air monitors are the same and the scrutiny—unless specifically directed—varies widely when combustible material is monitored. The interval of measurement is also important as was the established communication between the monitoring personnel and myself, representing public health.
To that point, we were aware of an interval of liberation of ultrafine particulate matter—meaning particles less that 2.5 microns—which have greater density, and can trigger inflammatory reactions in the body, even without initial pulmonary presentation. That means stroke, emboli, heart attacks, neurodegenerative effects, and more. They can also penetrate deeper into the respiratory tract, cross the blood-brain barrier, and have prolonged lung retention, thus promoting far higher lung and alveolar deposition compared with larger particles.
We communicated the finding to our hospital partners, so that they could look for those types of medical problems. There were several incidents that were detected. This was good because in many previous emergency responses, I have been frustrated when medical colleagues attribute heart attacks and cardiovascular complications to emotional stress caused by the untoward event. While that is certainly possible as a cause or etiology, it overlooks a major trigger. As such, I always employee a heightened awareness in any combustion related event—wildfire, refinery fire, industrial fire, upstream energy setting, or transportation related fires.
Some materials liberate with an overtly alarming smoke plume. These are called low smoke fuels. This can be misleading in terms of conventional threat monitoring. For this reason, the risk of low-smoke fuels is higher than that of traditional smoky fuels.
The recent publications of the distant health effects of the 2023 Canadian wildfires supports this. The links below are included so you can see for yourself.
In the meantime, maybe we should rethink the old chestnut that says "where there’s smoke, there’s fire" to "where's there's fire, there's not always smoke ...we can see?"
American Academy of Neurology’s 78th Annual Meeting. American Academy of Neurology: Neurology Resources | AAN
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