Bonus - What The Massive West Coast Forest Fires Mean For Our Health
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 18 September 2020
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Fire season in the western US is starting earlier and ending later each year and has seen larger, more intense fires in the last 10 years. How do these fires impact the health of people living nearby and, as smoke plumes spread across the US, can they impact the health of people further away? In this bonus episode, Dr. Kirsten Koehler, an expert in air pollution, talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about the massive fires currently burning on the west coast, the impacts on human health, how individuals can protect themselves, and what the rest of the US can expect as the smoke spreads.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 2 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins |
| 0:11.6 | Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.6 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, |
| 0:18.8 | and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:21.9 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day |
| 0:27.3 | through informative interviews with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public |
| 0:32.5 | health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at |
| 0:39.8 | Public Health Question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future |
| 0:47.2 | podcast episodes. Today, I speak to Dr. Kirsten Kohler, an associate professor of environmental |
| 0:54.0 | health and engineering |
| 0:55.3 | at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Kohler is an expert in air pollution, |
| 1:01.3 | and we're talking about the massive forest fires on the west coast of the United States |
| 1:06.3 | and what they mean for our health. Let's listen. |
| 1:13.6 | Dr. Kohler, thank you so much for joining me. |
| 1:17.6 | These pictures of the fires on the West Coast are just incredible. |
| 1:22.7 | And the pictures from San Francisco and other urban areas where the sky is practically blotted out are hard to believe. |
| 1:26.6 | What are the air pollution issues and the |
| 1:29.5 | risks to health right now? So when you have fires, you can have a variety of pollutants being emitted. |
| 1:34.1 | That can include most importantly particulate matter, which is what is leading to the degradation |
| 1:40.9 | visibility that you're seeing, but also increases in carbon monoxide and |
| 1:46.5 | ozone can be observed as well. |
| 1:49.0 | And for the particulate matter, we can have changes in particle sizes and chemical composition, |
... |
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