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Smoke from burning landscapes-including wildfires, prescribed burns, and agricultural clearing-can raise concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and other harmful air pollutants in areas hundreds or even thousands of miles from the epicenter of a blaze.[1][,][2] In a paper in this issue of EHP, researchers assessed landscape fires that occurred in Europe in 2005 and 2008, and estimated that the smoke they produced may have caused more than 2,500 premature deaths across more than two dozen countries.[3]
“This paper focused on mortality effects [of smoke from landscape fires], but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” says coauthor Timo Lanki, chief researcher at the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Kuopio, Finland. “There are so many more kinds of health effects that can result. … This is an indication of the scale of the problem, but only an indication.”
Lanki and colleagues combined satellite observations of radiant heat released by the fires and an atmospheric transport model of the smoke emissions that took into account humidity, weather, temperature, pressure, cloud cover, and solar radiation. They used these data to estimate daily concentrations of PM2.5 originating from fires, which they plotted across a 50×50-km[2] grid spanning 27 European countries. Then they overlaid the grid with estimates of population and premature mortality.[3]
Sarah Henderson, an environmental epidemiologist who studies wildfire smoke and health at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, says she was impressed with the robustness of the researchers’ methodology. Henderson, who was not involved in the study, adds, “It’s interesting because mortality is not the...