Wildfire smoke in Siberia causes ‘stay at home’ instruction

Posted on August 13, 2021 by Respro® UK Ltd

Yakutia leader declares ‘non-work’ day over health concerns as 22m acres burn in east Russia region

The leader of a Siberian region has declared Friday a non-working day and urged residents to stay at home as smoke from raging forest fires raised health concerns.

Aisen Nikolayev, the head of Yakutia, Russia’s largest and coldest region, which has been hard-hit by wildfires this year, said on Thursday that the day off would apply to the regional capital, Yakutsk, and several other districts.

In recent years wildfires have ripped across Russia’s vast territory at an unprecedented scale that experts blame on climate change, negligence and underfunded forestry management services.

Nikolayev said in remarks carried by the RIA Novosti news agency: “Smoke from the fires has an extremely negative effect on people’s well-being. In order to minimise these consequences today I signed a decree declaring tomorrow a non-working day for 11 municipalities.” Nikolayev recommended that residents spent the day at home.

Yakutsk airport was experiencing delays on Thursday with flights being cancelled or postponed due to poor visibility caused by the smoke.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, this week ordered reinforcements to fight the Siberian fires and sent the head of the emergencies ministry to Yakutia to oversee the operations there.

In the vast and sparsely populated region blazes have so far burned through more than 9.2m hectares (22.7m acres), an area the size of Portugal, according to Russia’s forestry agency.

Local firefighters told AFP that they lacked the people, equipment and resources to deal with the scale of the wildfires.

Critics have pointed to a 2015 law that allows regions to ignore blazes if the cost of fighting fires outweighs the expected damage, saying the legislation provides cover for authorities to avoid fighting wildfires.

The US space agency Nasa over the weekend said its satellite images showed wildfire smoke from Yakutia moving on to the north pole, calling it a first in history.

Wildfire smoke in Siberia causes ‘stay at home’ instruction | Wildfires | The Guardian

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Of air pollution and ‘environmental inequality’

Posted on August 12, 2021 by Respro® UK Ltd

Now more than ever, the world’s major cities are faced with air pollution that threatens the health of their inhabitants. But to ensure protection for all, policies to improve air quality must now take into account social and environmental inequalities.

Studies conducted in the United States and Europe say ethnic minorities and people living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods are more vulnerable to fine-particle pollution.

According to 2016 estimates, 56% of cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants in high-income countries do not meet World Health Organization (WHO) air-quality limits. In metropolises in low- and middle-income countries, this rate increases to 97%.

Moreover, local greening policies implemented by communities do not benefit all populations equally, points out a scientific article published on Aug 6 in the journal “Nature Communications”.

“Urban greening cannot compensate for systemic injustices that lead to disproportionate burdens in environmental health, and therefore, green infrastructure investments need to be balanced with other efforts to ameliorate air pollution injustices,” write the authors of the study.

These observations are based on the analysis of various studies published in recent years. Research published last April in “Science Advances” shows that Black, Hispanic and Asian people are significantly more exposed to pollution than the rest of the population in several major United States cities.

“Blacks are exposed to greater-than-average concentrations from source types contributing 78% of exposure. Hispanics and Asians are disparately exposed to PM2.5 from 87% and 73% of sources, respectively,” outlines that study.

In the US, this phenomenon could, at least in part, be explained by residential segregation, particularly that linked to “red-lining”, a discriminatory housing policy that began in the 1930s.

Conducted in Maryland’s Baltimore and then expanded to 37 urban areas across the country in a second phase, the research shows how patterns of residential segregation have contributed to an uneven distribution of green infrastructure and the increased presence of pollution, flooding and urban heat islands.

‘Environmental inequalities’ in Europe

The link between air pollution and social inequalities is also apparent in Europe. A study published in 2017 in 16 major European cities suggested that from one city to another, city dwellers living in disadvantaged neighbourhoods are more affected by poor air quality.

Another study published in 2015 in “Plos One” estimates that in Paris, people living in poor neighbourhoods are three times more likely to die than the average person following a major pollution spike – even though they do not necessarily live in the most polluted neighborhoods.

According to the study, this increased risk of mortality may be associated with less access to health services, as well as poorly insulated housing and/or workplaces.

These links are complex to establish, insofar as multiple forms of discrimination are factors as well as the geographical and socioeconomic situation of the populations.

In sociology, the environmental risk factors on the health of individuals is defined by the term “environmental inequalities” or “ecological inequality”.

“Ecological issues are not independent of social issues. Populations are not equal in the face of environmental risks, in terms of both vulnerability and responsibility,” explains French economist Éloi Laurent in an article published in April.

“And, as the Yellow Vests crisis in France has shown, policies to combat climate change cannot ignore considerations of social justice.”


Of air pollution and ‘environmental inequality’ | Free Malaysia Today (FMT)

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Researchers develop method to better predict when wildfire smoke affects residents

Posted on August 11, 2021 by Respro® UK Ltd

Last month, New York City and other cities along the east coast experienced some of the worst air pollution in the world. The cause? Wildfires in Canada, California, and Oregon so large they produced smoke that drifted thousands of miles. If smoke that dense can travel from one end of the U.S. to the other, imagine what it could do to your lungs.

Using satellites scientists can accurately see how far and wide wildfire smoke spreads across an area, but they have a more difficult time predicting whether the plumes are high in altitude or lower to the ground where it can gravely affect people’s health.

But a team of researchers led by University of Utah chemical engineering associate professor Heather A. Holmes has developed a method of combining a meteorological model with NASA satellite data to determine whether the wildfire smoke will stay high up or come down to the ground. That will lead to more accurate predictions of whether and when smoke from a nearby wildfire could reach people on the ground.

“Our hope is this technique gets incorporated into smoke forecasting as a way to improve warning systems related to smoke exposure,” says Holmes, whose research is focused on the physics and chemistry of air pollution.

Holmes’ research was published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. The first author was one of Holmes’s former graduate students, S. Marcela Loría-Salazar, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma’s School of Meteorology.

Before, scientists could not accurately predict whether wildfire smoke would actually reach the lower altitudes of an area where it can affect residents, even by examining satellite data of the smoke’s spread. For example, during the 2013 Yosemite Rim Fire in 2013, one of California’s largest wildfires that scorched more than 257,000 acres, they initially couldn’t explain why Fresno, Calif., had low levels of pollution even though satellite images from the fire showed smoke covering the city. It turns out the mountains created complex winds, and the smoke was actually in the upper level of the troposphere (the lowest region of the atmosphere) where it was separated from the Earth’s surface.

So Holmes and Loria-Salazar collaborated with NASA scientists and analyzed satellite data from the Yosemite Rim Fire along with ground observation data and developed a method to better understand the vertical smoke patterns. They examined what is called the “plume injection height” data from the satellite, an estimate of the top layer of the pollution, and the vertical meteorology at the time of the fire. With that, they developed a “smoke height/boundary ratio,” an estimate of how much of the smoke is going down to the surface of the Earth. Better understanding where the smoke is in the atmosphere vertically can help scientists also understand where the smoke will be downwind, says Holmes.

“There’s a lot of uncertainties in understanding the vertical mixing in the atmosphere, and that really drives where the smoke will end up,” she says.

With this new information, Holmes believes meteorologists, climatologists or air quality experts could possibly predict up to two or three days whether smoke from a wildfire could affect the health of residents in a nearby city.

“If you can forecast this, you can make more informed decisions on whether to have school closures, or you can give alerts on when to not go outside to exercise,” she says. “You can give people information to protect themselves better.”

Wood smoke produces microscopic particulate matter that can penetrate the lungs and adversely affect a person’s health, particularly those with lung and heart conditions, diabetes, older adults, younger children and pregnant women, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And studies show that wildfire smoke not only affects people while they are outside, but it also seeps into homes and affects indoor air quality.

Researchers develop method to better predict when wildfire smoke affects residents — ScienceDaily
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Mongolias Capital Experiences Severe Air Pollution Due To Siberian Wildfires

Posted on August 10, 2021 by Respro® UK Ltd

Air quality in the Mongolian capital city of Ulan Bator has been deteriorating dramatically due to smoke from massive wildfires raging in Russia’s Siberia, authorities said on Monday.

“Air quality in the capital city is now reaching very unhealthy level. Today, the average density of PM 2.5 in the city stayed at 151.5 micrograms per cubic meter, which is 15 times above WHO exposure recommendation,” the Mongolian national agency for meteorology and environment monitoring said in a statement.

The northern and central parts of Mongolia, including the capital city, have been covered with smoke since the middle of last week, which is from Russia’s Siberian wildfires.

Mongolias Capital Experiences Severe Air Pollution Due To Siberian Wildfires – UrduPoint
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Denver experienced the worst air quality of any major city in the world due to smoke from western wildfires

Posted on August 9, 2021 by Respro® UK Ltd

Denver experienced the worst air quality of any city in the world for several hours Saturday as heavy smoke from raging western wildfires polluted the city.

IQAir, a Swiss air quality technology company, determined that Denver’s air was the most polluted early Saturday at an Air Quality Index of 167. The measurement is by US standards, where a higher number indicates poorer air quality.

The company tracks the AQI for 94 major world cities. Later on Saturday, the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, moved to the top spot with a US AQI of 178.

The polluted air is a symptom of the 107 wildfires that are currently burning in the US and which have scorched 2.1 million acres as of Saturday, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

And it’s likely that the drought conditions fueling the fires will get worse before they get better.

“The fire outlook continues to reflect warmer and drier conditions leading to the high potential for severe wildfire activity throughout the western United States through the rest of summer and into the fall. Widespread high temperatures observed across areas in the West and with periods of lightning activity continue to exacerbate the wildfire situation,” the NIFC said on its website.

The wildfire season has been devastating for California, where the Dixie Fire — the nation’s largest active fire — continues to grow and destroy anything in its path.

The fire, which is burning in four California counties, swelled to 447,723 acres Saturday and remains 21% contained, according to Cal Fire.

Five people who were missing after the fire tore through the historic town of Greenville, California, have been found safe, the Plumas County Sheriff’s Office announced Saturday. A total of 21 unaccounted-for people are now confirmed safe, while authorities are still searching for five others, the office said.

Greenville was nearly leveled when the fire swept through it. In the community’s commercial center at Main Street and State Route 89, nearly every business appeared to have collapsed or been gutted, with flames still flickering in the debris up and down the sides of both streets, video recorded Wednesday by storm chaser Brandon Clement showed.

Fires across the region prompted California’s Placer County Public Health and the Placer County Air Pollution Control District to issue an air quality advisory Thursday, forecasting hazardous smoke impacts and warning residents to stay indoors.

“Sad to say, the prediction is correct,” Ann Hobbs, associate planner at the Placer County Air Pollution Control District, told CNN. Hobbs said officials had anticipated a change in the wind would bring poor air quality and smoke to residents living in the area.

“Avoid all unnecessary outdoor activity,” said Hobbs, adding that the air quality is the worst the area has seen all year.

Meanwhile, some areas within British Columbia are under evacuation orders or alerts as the White Rock Lake wildfire continues to spread, according to the British Columbia Wildfire Service.

The fire, burning near Vernon, has scorched about 135,900 acres. The city expanded its evacuation alert Friday night to include most of the city, according to a news release.

The expanded evacuation alert was made “out of an abundance of caution based on the advice of BC Wildfire due to increased fire activity and increased ember debris,” the City of Vernon tweeted.

Denver experienced the worst air quality of any major city in the world due to smoke from western wildfires – CNN

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Volatile compounds from personal products drive urban ozone chemistry

Posted on August 6, 2021 by Respro® UK Ltd

Emissions from products like deodorant and lotion played a major role in 2018 high ozone levels in New York

Personal care products like deodorant and lotion contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that add fragrance or texture—and these can be emitted into the air. Now, research suggests that in densely populated areas, these emissions have significant implications for air quality. During summer 2018, volatile chemical products played just as important a role in driving high ozone pollution levels in New York City as did volatile organic compounds (VOCs) produced by fossil fuel burning (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2021, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2026653118).

Ground-level ozone is a respiratory irritant and results when nitrogen oxides, mostly from vehicle tailpipes, react with VOCs in the presence of sunlight. Historically, most of those VOCs, such as benzene, have also come from fossil fuel combustion. VOCs such as pinene and limonene emitted by forests in the summer can also drive ozone chemistry. Decades of regulation have reduced vehicle emissions and have led to better air quality, says Matthew Coggon, an atmospheric chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a leader of the research. “But we still have ozone exceedances in megacities. What’s the cause?”

Chemists have been examining the role of volatile chemical products in ozone formation since the 1990s. These compounds, he says, are petrochemicals, and are found in a huge variety of products, including industrial solvents and personal care products. But Coggon says figuring out the importance of these compounds relative to VOCs from other sources has been challenging without sensitive measurements.

Coggon and his team drove a mobile lab, equipped with a proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer, around American cities including New York and Chicago, and European cities including Bern and Vienna. The team used relative ratios of tracer molecules to assign VOC signatures to different sources. High levels of benzene meant measured volatiles were likely a product of fossil fuel combustion. And high levels of decamethylcyclopentasiloxane (D5-siloxane), whose primary sources are antiperspirants and hair care products, meant other associated volatiles were also probably from personal care products. Volatile personal care product emissions, Coggon says, were correlated with population density.

Armed with these experimental data, they modeled the contributions of various VOC sources to ozone production in New York City in the summer of 2018. They looked in detail at July days when ozone levels exceeded regulatory standards. “These are the days when the chemistry is hot, and you can see all those reactions on a much grander scale,” says Coggon. They found that VOCs from chemical products played as large a role as VOCs from fossil fuel combustion in driving ozone production. Half of these chemical emissions were from personal care products, and were primarily monoterpenes, ethanol, and oxygenates. The other half were aromatics and alkanes from coatings and adhesives. Coggon says this is likely to be the case in other megacities with dense populations that commonly use these products.

“This clearly makes the case that emissions from volatile consumer products are really important in our urban areas now that we’ve cleaned up other sources like cars and trucks,” says Allen Goldstein, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the research. “If we want to make further progress we have to look elsewhere. We need to re-evaluate the most important contributors to VOCs that lead to ozone and aerosol formation.”

Volatile compounds from personal products drive urban ozone chemistry
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Denver’s air is bad today. It’s expected to be worse Thursday and Friday.

Posted on August 5, 2021 by Respro® UK Ltd

State health officials warn of a mix of ozone and new surge of smoke from California fires

Colorado health officials are anticipating “very poor air quality” along the Front Range through the weekend as smoke wafting from California wildfires mixes with elevated ozone pollution.

State health officials have issued ozone “action day” alerts for a record 30 days in a row —  since July 5 — urging residents to mow lawns and refuel vehicles after 5 p.m.

A new surge of smoke from large fires in northern California will increase both ozone and fine particulate pollution through the weekend, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment meteorologist Scott Landes said Wednesday morning.

“Smoke will spread from west to east across Colorado into Thursday,” Landes said. He also said that fires on the Western Slope “that have been pretty quiet” may start back up on Friday with drier and windier conditions, which “could add some additional smoke to the mix for the Front Range.”

Temperatures are expected to reach up to 95 degrees this weekend, which will favor increased formation of ozone as pollution from vehicles and industries bakes in sunlight.

State health officials have issued health advisories due to ozone along the Front Range from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, recommending older people, children, and people with respiratory and other health problems minimize outdoor activity.

The ozone levels measured at state stations show average concentrations consistently higher than the 70 parts per billion federal health limit.

Over the past week, state health bulletins have warned of “multiple pollutants,” similar to the period between Aug. 11-16, 2020, when wildfire smoke mixed with ozone.

Recent rains have brought some relief, as significant rainfall and thunderstorms can decrease both particulates and ozone. But air pollution control officials say higher humidity also can increase the concentrations of particulates and ozone.

Denver’s air is bad today. It’s expected to be worse Thursday and Friday.
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Fine particulate air pollution associated with higher risk of dementia

Posted on August 4, 2021 by Respro® UK Ltd
Ten-year average PM2.5 exposure predictions based on 2000–2009 data and smoothed to broadly represent pollution differences in the Puget Sound region. Shaded circles indicate study participant addresses. Credit: Magali Blanco/University of Washington

Using data from two large, long-running study projects in the Puget Sound region—one that began in the late 1970s measuring air pollution and another on risk factors for dementia that began in 1994—University of Washington researchers identified a link between air pollution and dementia.

In the UW-led study, a small increase in the levels of fine particle pollution (PM2.5 or particulate matter 2.5 micrometers or smaller) averaged over a decade at specific addresses in the Seattle area was associated with a greater risk of dementia for people living at those addresses.

“We found that an increase of 1 microgram per cubic meter of exposure corresponded to a 16% greater hazard of all-cause dementia. There was a similar association for Alzheimer’s-type dementia,” said lead author Rachel Shaffer, who conducted the research as a doctoral student in the UW Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences.

“The ACT Study is committed to advancing dementia research by sharing its data and resources, and we’re grateful to the ACT volunteers who have devoted years of their lives to supporting our efforts, including their enthusiastic participation in this important research on air pollution,” said Dr. Eric Larson, ACT’s founding principal investigator and a senior investigator at KPWHRI.

The study, published Aug. 4 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, looked at more than 4,000 Seattle-area residents enrolled in the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) Study run by Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in collaboration with UW. Of those residents, the researchers identified more than 1,000 people who had been diagnosed with dementia at some point since the ACT Study began in 1994.

Once a patient with dementia was identified, researchers compared the average pollution exposure of each participant leading up to the age at which the dementia patient was diagnosed. For instance, if a person was diagnosed with dementia at 72 years old, the researchers compared the pollution exposure of other participants over the decade prior to when each one reached 72. In these analyses, the researchers also had to account for the different years in which these individuals were enrolled in the study, since air pollution has dropped dramatically in the decades since the ACT study began.

In their final analysis, the researchers found that just a 1 microgram per cubic meter difference between residences was associated with 16% higher incidence of dementia. To put that difference into perspective, Shaffer said, in 2019 there was approximately 1 microgram per cubic meter difference in PM2.5 pollution between Pike Street Market in downtown Seattle and the residential areas around Discovery Park.

“We know dementia develops over a long period of time. It takes years—evendecades—for these pathologies to develop in the brain, and so we needed to look at exposures that covered that extended period,” Shaffer said. And, because of long-running efforts by many UW faculty and others to build detailed databases of air pollution in our region, “we had the ability to estimate exposures for 40 years in this region. That is unprecedented in this research area and a unique aspect of our study.”

In addition to extensive air pollution and dementia data for the region, other study strengths included lengthy address histories and high-quality procedures for dementia diagnoses for the ACT Study participants.

“Having reliable address histories let us obtain more precise air pollution estimates for study participants,” said senior author Lianne Sheppard, a UW professor of environmental and occupational health sciences and of biostatistics. “These high-quality exposures combined with ACT’s regular participant follow-up and standardized diagnostic procedures contribute to this study’s potential policy impact.”

While there are many factors such as diet, exercise and genetics associated with the increased risk of developing dementia, air pollution is now recognized to be among the key potentially modifiable risk factors. The new UW-led results add to this body of evidence suggesting air pollution has neurodegenerative effects and that reducing people’s exposure to air pollution could help reduce the burden of dementia.

“How we’ve understood the role of air pollution exposure on health has evolved from first thinking it was pretty much limited to respiratory problems, then that it also has cardiovascular effects, and now there’s evidence of its effects on the brain,” said Sheppard, who this year was awarded the Rohm & Haas Endowed Professorship of Public Health Sciences.

“Over an entire population, a large number of people are exposed. So, even a small change in relative risk ends up being important on a population scale,” Shaffer said. “There are some things that individuals can do, such as mask-wearing, which is becoming more normalized now because of COVID. But it is not fair to put the burden on individuals alone. These data can support further policy action on the local and national level to control sources of particulate air pollution.”

Fine particulate air pollution associated with higher risk of dementia
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