Abstract
In July 2002, lightning strikes ignited over 250 fires in Quebec, Canada, destroying over one million hectares of forest. The smoke plume generated from the fires had a major impact on air quality across the east coast of the U.S. Using data from the Medicare National Claims History File and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) National air pollution monitoring network, we evaluated the health impact of smoke exposure on 5.9 million elderly people (ages 65+) in the Medicare population in 81 counties in 11 northeastern and Mid-Atlantic States of the US. We estimated differences in the exposure to ambient PM2.5-airborne particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter of ≤2.5 μm-concentrations and hospitalizations for cardiovascular, pulmonary and injury outcomes, before and during the smoke episode. We found that there was an associated 49.6% (95% confidence interval (CI), 29.8, 72.3) and 64.9% (95% CI, 44.3-88.5) increase rate of hospitalization for respiratory and cardiovascular diagnoses, respectively, when the smoke plume was present compared to before the smoke plume had arrived. Our study suggests that rapid increases in PM2.5 concentrations resulting from wildfire smoke can impact the health of elderly populations thousands of kilometers removed from the fires.
Highlights
Forest fires are known to be a major source of air pollutants [1] on a local and a global scale [2,3,4,5,6].Each year, combustion products from local and distant wildfires impact large populations worldwide [5,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]
We considered specific cardiovascular and respiratory outcomes that have been associated in the literature with short-term exposure to PM2.5
Missing concentrations were imputed using a natural spline interpolation method that accounts for the daily seasonality in PM2.5
Summary
Forest fires are known to be a major source of air pollutants [1] on a local and a global scale [2,3,4,5,6].Each year, combustion products from local and distant wildfires impact large populations worldwide [5,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. There has been a limited but growing body of literature addressing the impact of shorter-term exposure to smoke from forest and bush fires (referred to as wildfires in this paper) [8,9,11,17,29,30,31,32,33]. The majority of these studies have examined the impact on nearby local communities of exposures to wildfire aerosols. In Canada, Moore et al estimated that forest fire smoke in 2003 was associated with excess respiratory complaints in Kelowna (Kelowna, BC, Canada) area residents [31]
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