Another Cost Of Wildfires: Breathing Toxic Smoke

At the end of twenty nineteen and into twenty twenty, massive bushfires ravaged Australia in what became known as Black Summer.

You know, you look outside at ten o'clock in the morning and it would be a black sky and the sun, if you could say, the sun would kind of be like a red dot. It's just such an extreme amount of smoke.

We hear a lot about the huge economic cost of wildfires like this that are growing in frequency and size across the globe. Just look at a place like California. Homes destroyed, people's lives turned upside down. But the Australia disaster is now three years later, awakened officials around the world to another toll that's been harder to pin down.

The fires raged across eastern Australia for months on end. They generated so much smoke they engulfed farmland, towns, twenty four million hectares of land, the area equivalent to half of California. It was just such a huge event.

Just the scale of them was something that well most of Australia had never experienced before. And also because it touched so much of the population, you know, by some master it's eighty percent of the population. That there weren't many people who weren't affected. And it really brought something that maybe had had in the past, been something that affected rural areas of Australia or remote communities. It brought these fires into the city. People in the city were

It was awful to live through.

We wanted to go out and see what the long term effects of this fire were. We knew that it had devastating consequences in the immediate aftermath, but something that long and that severe, we thought, well, three years after the event, what is that done to people who lived through that, and particularly what is it done to the kids, the really young kids at the time who were breathing in that smoke, and also the mothers who were pregnant at the time, who were breathing in that smoke and

A lot of the women that we spoke to, they're still very traumatized when you talk about that event. At the time, a lot of women say now reflecting they weren't really equipped to stay out of the smoke to try and prevent breathing those toxic particles into their bodies. We were told that masks, which of course were all now very familiar with, that the time was so hard to access, trying to keep smoke out of your house by blocking underdoors with wet towels, putting towels over fans

What we discovered was that the bush far or wildfire smoke contains hundreds of different ingredients and a lot of poisonous gases. You can imagine, it just burns through everything. It's not a control blaze burning one particular type of fuel. It burns through vehicles, It burns through houses, building materials, and a thing that might be toxic in the house goes up and smoke as best OFSS, bricks, concrete. There's

And PM two point five is how scientists describe the particulate matter in pollution or in wildfire smoke that lodges in the lungs.

That's right, so small it penetrates your lungs, can even enter the blood stream, and of course once it's in your bloodstream, it can do all sorts of damage to different organs. And that's really the matter that does the damage. There's PM two point five in ambient air pollution, but wildfaretmoke is particularly concentrated.

And what is the difference between wildfire smoke and just air pollution.

Well, ambient air pollution is something that most of the world deals with, you know, according to the World Health Organization, almost everybody is breathing in some kind of polluted air at some point.

But wildfast smoke is traditionally.

Very elevated for short periods of time at PM two point five levels shoot off the scale. And at some point during Black Summer in Australia, levels were ten times more than safe levels in Australia, so it was very elevated. And I think what marked Black Summer at was just the longevity of the burning. Usually these things last a few days. Black Summer burned for weeks and weeks and nineteen weeks on end in some areas. So I think that's what academics and people really interested in, Well, what

Fay Johnston, who's kind of like a world renowned researcher on wildfire smoke, and she's based in Tasmania, in our southern state of Australia, so she's been studying this for twenty years and she kind of describes it as like this toxic mix of harmful gases, including nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide.

So when I'm talking about particles suspended in the air, they can range from great big bits of dust that you can see or ash from a fire, right down to nanoparticle sized bits of carbon or other things.

The tinier the particle, the more it gets into your system. So anything smaller than a size of two and a half micrometers micrometer is one thousandth of a millimeter, so it's really really tiny. Anything smaller than two point five will enter into your lungs and can cross into your bloodstream or so we offer talk about PM two point five as one marker of particles and that's that smaller size class, and that's the one most studied for health.

Any kind of combustion.

Will give off a lot of particles and a lot of PM two point five. And when you're burning wood or bushfires, that kind of we call it biomass combustion, that generates a lot of PM two point five and fast smaller size classes. So it's a really important source of harmful particles in the air.

So when you.

Breathe, particles in your body will react to it like it reacts to any hazards, and it will activate your stress responses and your immune responses, just like if you've got pneumonia or if you've got to burn, your body reacts to the stress or the threat, and it does that in a whole lot of ways.

And the other thing to think about amongst all this is your underlying predisposition, the genetic factors that contribute to you as a person, and what this kind of vision might activate in your system, and then therefore what the medium and long term consequences might be.

What Fay told us was that if you are a healthy person, maybe you could withstand several days of elevated PM two point five. But if you were perhaps just susceptible to asthma. The same dose might trigger some long term consequences in your own body, So it would have different effects to different people, and you mayn't even know that you're susceptible to it. Almost in that respect, it's a bit of a lottery as to what it might

And you decided to concentrate on children. Why is that?

We were aware that there was quite a major research study happening in the state of New South Wales that was trying to find out some answers around the medium and long term health impacts of black Summer. It's called the Mother and Child twenty twenty study, and it's conducted by a group of well known, high profile researchers who know what they're doing. Basically, we were really interested to

And that doctor's name is Rebecca McGough and here she is talking to you.

There was one particular case that really made me set up and start to take notice of this whole issue, and it was a woman who baby was born early the baby was born smaller.

But what really.

Struck me was her comments about her placenta, and she was told that her placenta looked like she'd been a smoker pacadet smoker. And the midwives were all around a circle looking at this placenta. They took photos of it, and they said.

You're a smoker, and she denied it. She said, I've never smoked in my life.

And another mother described her a placenter's being gritty.

A normal placenta is pink and fleshy, and it looks healthy. A disease percenter has a lot of gray in it and chalky white bits and parts of it that look at what we call friable or a bit fragile, like breaking away. The presenter is the most important thing to keep the baby growing, so it is the powerhouse, so it nourishes the baby.

It's the pathway, the portal between.

What the mother breeds in and what she eats, and how that all that good nourishment is passed on to the baby viole the percenta and the babies we know.

We also spoke to some doctors at the time, two obstetricians who also described similar kind of experiences. But there was one particular doctor, Michael Holland, who was a roving obstetrician in Dan, south of Sydney, and he describes seeing three still berths in an era that would ordinarily have three hundred berths in a year, and that is very unusual, he told us.

And that's either a coincidence or it's attributed to something.

After the break, A mother describes the effects she believes breathing smoke had on her child.

There was one boy, Colt, who was the son of one woman that we spoke to Dan and Allighan, about.

Four hours south of Sydney. The fires rolled in in.

Early twenty twenty and he's still on breathing medication.

Dan Night, and you spoke to Colt's mother, Casey Douglas.

I just remember I pulled him under my shirt and I had him here and I was trying to just shelter him from the smoke. But looking outside at the glass windows, the smoke was just in. No matter how many all the windows were shut, the smoke was still coming in under the door. He was a healthy one year old before the smoke, and the smoke was present, but Colt didn't get bad until it was so close to us.

There are the kids who perhaps not on regular medication now, but had used ventaline or breathing medication at some point in the preceding period. It's a medication to help you breathe. It's essentially a relaxant. It opens up the airways and

No one's quick to link anything to the fires here, but yeah, I know in my heart that the breathing issues happened straight after the fires, if not during. He's now on an asthma plan for his preschool and he has a preventer in the morning and in her at night. And if he doesn't have that prevenna, he has a really bad day. And he can hardly run around the poor thing without wheezing and being out of breath and puff.

There was a woman we interviewed in a beautiful coastal town called Tura Beach, which is south of Sydney, and Emma and I drove down to meet a mother called Jan Spears who was worried about her daughter Mia.

And that's the woman we heard about earlier who believed her placenta had been damaged by wildfire smoke.

We spoke to her in her home and she was just reeling off all the specialists in MIA's medical team who were attending to her. There was a physiotherapist, there was an occupational therapist, there was a speech therapist, there was a pediatric neurologist trying to figure out what was wrong with Mian. And Jen had had gone through this intense period of smoke exposure.

She had as referred.

To earlier, she had gone through this sort of five or six week period of intense smoke.

She tried escaping to Canberra. The smoke was actually worse than camera.

She came back home and Tura Beach was really one of those places that was almost sort of surrounded. It was ambushed, if you like, by while far and they didn't see the sun for weeks and there was smoke all over the house. And this was when Jem was pregnant with Mia. And it should be said that doctors haven't connected MIA's symptoms with that smoke exposure, but it's something that preys on Jen. And Mia missed her milestones,

And she has hip.

Dysplasia, which is the medical term for a hip socket that doesn't fully cover the ball portion of the upper thigh bone. So really worrying symptoms that doctors haven't yet connected to the smoke exposure. But then Jen is wondering, you know, was it due to those few weeks of smoke exposure.

Do we need to do things differently?

And she said she was talking to us, so no one else in her position had to go through the same experience again, So it's that gap in knowledge that we spoke about earlier. That's really sort of weighing on these mothers as well.

Amy, our doctor is able to draw connections between the fires and these sorts of physical ailments that aren't just breathing difficulties that you might naturally associate with in ailing smoke.

We asked these of the general practitioner Rebecca McGowan as well. She is part of a number of lobby groups on

It was estimated that in Sydney at the height of the black summer smoke and the fires, that it would be walking around Sydney would be equivalent to smoking thirty seven cigarettes in one day, and that was actually closer so closer to the fires, it would be more than that.

So we have that data for the last seventy years.

On what smoking looks like in a woman pregnant woman, so we can extrapolate a little bit. We're not just blind blind with this. We do have some scientific information.

What do we know about the wide bread health effects of the fires in Australia overall?

This is the key question. We know what it did to people at the time. There's good data and the immediate aftermath of higher presentations to emergency departments for cardiovascular complaints, for ventil in prescriptions, for breathing difficulties, so all that data is immediately available. What we don't know is what it's done to people like now three years after the event. And as Amy says that mother and Child twenty twenties

Unlikely to be reversed.

So there were indicators in the past about what generic air pollution does to children, but nothing really that pointed to long term effects of wildfastmok in particular.

I think that's what people are wrestling with.

Now, as wildfare has a projected become more common, more severe, longer lasting. The wider picture, there are countries that will be impacted by wildfire smoke that haven't been impacted while I smoke to such a degree in the future, as the climate continues to warm.

When we come back, what's the plan for a future with more wildfires and more smoke.

We know that meteorologists are warning bushfires are going to become more frequent and destructive, and this whole problem is just becoming to be tweet ignore. Already it's costing as much as thirty six billion dollars a year in the US alone. Meteorologists say that, you know, bushfires, wildfires are going to become more frequent and more destructive as temperatures continue to rise, and we already know that long term health problems are just going to add to that bill.

It was a really good United Nations Environment Program report on wildfires, and that pointed to a lot of the fires that were burning around the world that we hadn't seen before. I think that they said in twenty twenty fires in the Russian Arctic, for instance, burn tens of millions of factors, and they'd been earlier.

Blazers in Alaska in Greenland and Canada, and I think most warring.

And this was statistic that really struck me was that these kind of catastrophes like Black Summer are almost sixty percent more likely to happen this century as the climate warns. And I think whereas California has experienced eight of its ten largest fars on record in just the past five years, which might tell you something. And we've had fires in suburbs of major cities as well, like Athens Boulder in Colorado. So I guess that's the pattern that's emerging.

What is Australia doing to try to protect people's health the next time around in a way that they couldn't anticipate before.

There was a key inquiry straight after the bush fires the Black Summer into what happened, how we could approach the next disaster better, and Royal Commission into the Black Summer and that came out with eighty recommendations, including improving air quality indication, improving the flow of information to people in fire spots, working with the indigenous community to work out how to manage the land better. Some of those

Our worldwide organizations like the w h O or the UN trying to get together to figure out how to get their arms around this problem.

In the next few months, we expect the World Health Organization to release a major evidence review of this issue, so hopefully bringing together all that we know, and we have spoken to doctor Mary Prinicki, who is a scientist at Stanford who worked on that evidence review. She has said that it's going to make a number of recommendations globally for countries, so we do know that there is

Amy Angus, thanks so much for speaking with me today. Thank you thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Ergalina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Rebecca Shasson