First modification:
When air quality plummets, the general recommendation is to stay home and isolate yourself from the outside as much as possible to avoid breathing in pollution. However, that is not possible for everyone. The health risks that pollution entails are aggravated in people with previous illnesses, with difficult living conditions or with precarious jobs.
They look like scenes from a science fiction movie, but they are the streets of New York or Washington, enveloped in orange smoke due to the fires that are raging across several Canadian provinces. This time, the images have gone around the world, but something similar happens somewhere on the globe every time there is a climate disaster of this caliber.
The first casualty is air quality. Although there are several factors that influence the purity of the air we breathe, there is one that should be of particular concern to us when it comes to fire pollution: particulate matter. The burning of forests and land emits into the air millions of tiny particles, thinner than a human hair, which are harmful to health when inhaled without realizing it.
They are PM2.5 or PM10 particles. The larger PM10 tends to affect the upper respiratory tract (the throat, for example), while the smaller PM2.5 penetrates further into our organs and can accumulate in the tissue of our lungs, causing inflammation.
The consequences on our health, especially respiratory and cardiovascular, are harsh. A punctual exposure does not usually leave long-term damage, but it can end in bronchitis or an asthma attack in the elderly, children, or people with previous conditions. Constant exposure, however, has long-term damage to chronic diseases, such as increased risk of diabetes or pulmonary obstruction.
In 2021, a study published in The Lancet sought to quantify this impact in deaths caused by air pollution from forest fires (pollution in general kills about 7 million people annually). In this case, 33,500 lives are lost each year. Unfortunately, the number could increase in the coming years, in which climate change and global warming are expected to make fires more frequent.
Stay at home?
To minimize these impacts, the recommendations are clear: avoid breathing polluted air as much as possible. That is, stay inside the house and isolate the house in all possible ways, with special care in the cracks in doors and windows. Also avoid physical effort and keep indoor air clean, with air filters and avoiding activities such as sweeping or frying many foods.
However, this is not possible for everyone, as the Covid-19 pandemic has already taught us. For starters, for the more than 100,000 people living without a home in New York and Washington. The New York NGO Coalition for the Homeless, ‘Coalition for the Homeless’ in English, remembered in a statement that, in this type of environmental crisis, “a safe haven saves lives”. Dave Giffen, director of the organization, was forceful in an interview with ABC News: “As the weather worsens and being exposed to the elements becomes more and more dangerous, housing is no longer just a question of health, but of save the life”.
The situation is not easy for the 11% of New Yorkers living in overcrowded conditions, especially in the poorest neighborhoods and in racialized communities such as African Americans or Latinos. Less so, when a family with few resources does not have access to air conditioning that can keep the interior of the house habitable during environmental and air pollution crises.
Some crises that disproportionately affect all those who cannot stay at home without going to face-to-face work, which is the reality of the majority of precarious jobs. For example, construction work, already strenuous in itself, is especially risky when pollution invades the air, precisely because physical activity in these conditions increases the amount of harmful particles that are inhaled. Local media reported that construction work did not stop during the most critical moments of environmental contamination.
All this, without mentioning that the populations with fewer resources are already the ones that are most affected by previous respiratory or cardiovascular diseases, which are precisely the ones that are most at risk at the moment. Without going any further, Afro children have much higher rates of asthma than white children, partly due to poor living conditions.
The Afro population also has higher pressure, in general, than the non-racial population, with the health problems that derive from this condition, and the prevalence of cardiovascular diseases among people with few resources tends to be of at least double the prevalence among the richest.
All this, while the air is already dissipating in New York and Washington and gradually recovering its normal state, so that the crisis quickly becomes an anecdote of orange skies. However, an air similar to what they breathed for three days on the east coast of the United States is what the inhabitants of New Delhi in India, for example, or in Lahore, Pakistan, breathe every day.
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