Wildfire smoke toxicity much worse than car pollution

ScientificBlogging: The health threat to city dwellers posed by Southern California wildfires like those of November 2008 may have been underestimated by officials, according to a new paper analyzing particulate matter (PM) from wildfires in Southern California. Detailed particulate analysis of the smoke produced by previous California wild fires indicates that the composition posed more serious potential threats to health than is generally realized..

The paper, entitled "Physicochemical and Toxicological Profile of Particulate Matter (PM) in Los Angeles during the October 2007 Southern California Wildfires," will appear in Environmental Science and Technology. It confirms earlier studies by air polllution specialist Constantinos Sioutas of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, who is also co-director of the Southern California Particle Center.

For the study Sioutas and colleagues from USC, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and RIVM (the National Institute of Health and the Environment of the Netherlands) analyzed the particular matter gathered during the fall 2007 blazes. "Fire emissions produce a significantly larger aerosol in size than typically seen in urban environments during periods affected by traffic sources, which emit mostly ultrafine particles," Sioutas said. "Staying indoors may not provide protection from smoke particles in the absence of air conditioning or the ability to recirculate filtered indoor air. This is because the fire particles can penetrate indoor structures more readily than particles from vehicular emissions."…

Smoke from a California fire in October, 2007, shot by Erin Pettigrew, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License