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What Are The Long-Term Health Effects Of Breathing In All This Wildfire Smoke?
Wildfires have caused record-breaking stretches of bad air quality in the Bay Area these last few years. In this interview with KALW community radio, Dr. Gina Solomon, former director of PHI’s Achieving Resilient Communities (ARC) and PHI’s Science for Toxic Exposure Prevention program speaks about the long term health effects of breathing in all this smoke.
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Tracking California
Wildfires have caused record-breaking stretches of bad air quality in the Bay Area these last few years. In this interview with KALW community radio, Dr. Gina Solomon from UCSF and the Public Health Institute’s Tracking California program speaks about the long term health effects of breathing in all this smoke.
MARISSA ORTEGA-WELCH, SCIENCE REPORTER: What do you worry about for people in terms of the long term health effects of all of this smoke?
DR. GINA SOLOMON: I was interviewed a few years ago about wildfire smoke and health effects. And I was saying, “This is a short term thing. It’s just happening for a few weeks this year. And so we need to worry about the acute effects.” And year after year, as these fires come back and they stretch over more weeks and more months, it gets harder and harder to just talk about the acute effects. We really have to think about long-term health effects.
Some people who are breathing wildfire smoke today are paying a price right away ... Other people are going to be paying the price years and years from now decades from now, as their lung function declines in a subtle way as they get older.Dr. Gina Solomon, former director of PHI’s Achieving Resilient Communities (ARC) and PHI’s Science for Toxic Exposure Prevention
Originally published by KALW
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