If our region had a giant smoke detector in the skies above us, it would have been beeping incessantly this month. We were smothered, quite literally, by two blankets of wildfire smoke from the forests of Canada hundreds of miles away. Do you understand now WHY we call it GLOBAL warming? What happens in one part of the world affects us ALL.
I began my personal crusade for cleaner air and water in grade school, working alongside the nun who once suspended me for being “rough, tough, rude, crude and unrefined” to plant trees for a new arboretum. When it came to the environment and public health, we were partners in protection. I still plant trees. I worked with Hamilton County Parks to plant 55 trees on my 55th birthday. I’m not done yet.
As an asthmatic who lost permanent lung function growing up under the “smoke-smuggered stars” of Cleveland, Ohio, I worried first about myself. Would I ever be able to run a full mile without stopping or wheezing? Sadly, the answer is “no.”
After raising three children in the Cincinnati area and coaching hundreds of young soccer players, my concerns grew along with those beautiful children. I never had a team without at least one asthmatic, and the most frightening moment was the day a 7-year-old began wheezing in the middle of the game and I discovered the babysitter who brought her forgot her inhaler. We were fortunate this case didn’t end in tragedy. The family of Jovante Woods was not so lucky. It was in 2010 that the 16-year-old son of Bengals star Ickey Woods died from complications of an asthma attack.
These children represent just one of the many vulnerable populations at risk from the wildfire smoke that can reach us from the western United States or the northern provinces of Canada. But they would be at risk even if those wildfires never happened. The Ohio River Valley traps pollutants and is highly susceptible to the air inversions that allow the summer sun (and now spring and fall sun) to bake the pollutants released by our cars, factories and coal-fired power plants into toxic ozone. Our asthma rates are consistently higher than the national average, and the American Lung Association regularly grades our air quality as a D or F. We are failing our children when we fail to act.
Although most people realize the elderly and those with chronic respiratory disease or heart disease are at risk, they don’t always appreciate the other vulnerable populations in our communities. Children are at highest risk, because their lungs are not fully developed. They breathe differently than we do. They spend more time outdoors playing. Their activity levels are generally higher. All of this means, they are taking in more pollutants relative to their body weight and size. They are at risk, which I’m reminded of every time I watch my grandson run around a soccer field and suddenly screech to a halt to catch his breath. All of our children are at risk, and we need to do more to protect them.
The wildfire smoke also disproportionately affected those from lower socio-economic groups who tend to live clustered near highways and daily experience high levels of traffic-related air pollution, noise, and psycho-social stressors. They are less likely to have air conditioning or high-efficiency particulate absorbing (HEPA) filter devices to reduce their exposure from fine particulates. These PM2.5 pollutants and the ultrafine particles that are even smaller travel enormous distances from those wildfires which is why they ended up here in the Tristate. But they also travel to the deepest parts of our lungs where we take in oxygen and get rid of the waste gas carbon dioxide. They irritate and inflame the lungs, further reducing lung capacity. The damage doesn’t stop there. Once in the lungs, those fine particles get into our bloodstream and can travel anywhere in the body. That means they can affect a developing baby, harm our hearts, and affect the function of our brain. Environmental justice demands that we act to protect these vulnerable populations.
This is the work we’re doing at Northern Kentucky University. In our lab, we are taking baby steps toward identifying yet another vulnerable population – those with genetic differences than make them more susceptible to traffic-related air pollution, wildfire and cigarette smoke, and fossil fuel burning. We’ve been fortunate to have been funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences since 2012 to look for these genetic differences and since 2018 to focus specifically on traffic-related air pollution (TRAP). We’re making progress with the help of numerous undergraduate student researchers who are spending their summer vacations trying to make a difference in the lives of those in Northern Kentucky and throughout the planet.
Please join them. It takes more than a village to make a difference when the problem is as massive as the fires burning up north. As the Lorax told us way back in 1970 when the Cuyahoga River burned, “UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
Christine Perdan Curran, PhD, is a professor of Biological Sciences and director of the Neuroscience Program at Northern Kentucky University.