Scientists at Oregon Tech recently received a $1 million federal grant. This could lead to research to improve health in southern Oregon from wildfire smoke.
Since 2019, a team of Oregon Tech scientists has been studying the ability of Rogue Valley hospitals to handle patients who arrived with respiratory problems during wildfires when air quality plummeted. I was.
“For what’s called ‘purple’ where the air quality is very poor, there’s about a 70% chance that the hospital will exceed capacity,” says Kyle Chapman, associate professor of sociology and population health. . Speaking to Oregon Public Broadcasting, at the Oregon Institute of Technology.
Chapman and his colleagues plan to expand their focus to include hospitalizations due to heart disease experienced during wildfires, in addition to respiratory diseases such as asthma that wildfire smoke can exacerbate.
“I feel like some of these other conditions that are related to heart disease, which is far more prevalent than chronic respiratory disease, also play a big role here,” he said.
Examining how hospital admissions change during wildfires, Chapman says staffing levels, similar to what is already happening during the summer, when emergency room visits increase said that changes could occur.
Federal funding will also allow scientists to install new monitors outside and inside homes in Klamath Falls, Oregon. This can reveal chemicals in wildfire smoke. It threatens homes and businesses beyond the forest.
“Not only do we measure the amount of smoke in the air on a large scale, but we also know where the smoke came from, what kind of things burned in the fire that produced it, and potentially how the smoke came to be.” It shows that the smoke is dangerous to human health,” says Adelaide Clarke, a former associate professor of chemistry at the Oregon Institute of Technology and now a faculty member at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. Told.
According to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s newly released wildfire smoke trends report, Klamath Falls had 38 days last year when air quality was found to be unhealthy for all groups of people, and 2018 It broke the city’s record for the year. .
