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Health burden from peat wildfire in North Carolina
Citation:
Rappold, A. Health burden from peat wildfire in North Carolina. Society of Toxicology, San Diego, CA, March 22 - 26, 2015.
Impact/Purpose:
The talk will summarize results from previously published studies of health impacts attribuatable to peat wildfire in North Carolina.
Description:
In June 2008, a wildfire smoldering through rich peat deposits in the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge produced massive amounts of smoke and exposed a largely rural North Carolina area to air pollution in access of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. In this talk, we present the impacts of smoke exposure on the communities affected by this fire. We used acute cardiorespiratory outcomes reported through the syndromic surveillance program to characterize health outcomes, County Health Rankings to characterize community health with respect to health behaviors, access and quality of clinical care, social and economic factors, as well as, premature mortality and morbidity. To characterize exposure, we used satellite measured aerosol optical depth and dispersion models. We demonstrated strong associations between peat wildfire smoke and emergency department visits for asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pneumonia and acute bronchitis, as well as cardiopulmonary symptoms and congestive heart failure in the exposed counties. In contrast, no associations were observed in neighboring unexposed counties. The largest differences in risk for asthma and congestive heart failure visits were observed after stratifying on the basis of socio-economic factors. Finally, we simulated public health forecast-based interventions to show the potential for use of modeled smoke forecasts toward reducing the health burden and showed a significant economic benefit of such actions. We demonstrated that implementing forecast-based interventions implemented at the low to intermediate levels of smoke can result in reduction of health burden while interventions implemented at the high smoke levels would be ineffective in reducing health risks at any level of compliance. In summary, exposures to smoke have a harmful effect to health and the burden may be disproportionally distributed with respect to socio-economic factors of the community. The economic health burden was estimated to exceed 48 million dollars, with 87% attributed to the excess mortality. This abstract does not necessarily reflect U.S. EPA policy.