Smoke exposure from California’s wildfires linked to 52,000 early deaths, study says
When large swaths of the East Coast were shrouded in wildfire smoke last summer, scientists in California grimly joked that maybe, finally, power brokers in New York and Washington, D.C. would be spurred to act on the burning issue that has long plagued the West Coast. Despite wildfire seasons that regularly burn hundreds of thousands of acres in California alone each year, researchers know relatively little about the long-term effects of chronic wildfire smoke on the body, and funding to reduce the known harms of exposure is scarce.
In a paper published Friday in Science Advances, researchers at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health tried to chip away at that knowledge gap. They estimated that somewhere between 52,480 and 55,710 people in California died prematurely between 2008-2018 due to chronic exposure to the dangerous particulate matter in wildfire smoke. And the economic impact of those deaths was at least $432 billion.
