Are there long-term physical effects of wildfire smoke?


There isn’t any  published research yet about long-term physical effects of wildfire smoke on people in affected area communities, and not much about them in wildfire-fighters, either.  However, wildfire-fighters are known to experience chronic lung and systemic inflammation from smoke that probably contributes to development of respiratory diseases in some cases.

Wildfire smoke particulate matter is made of some of the same chemicals that human-caused particulate matter is made of, but there are some chemical differences between them.  Because of the differences and lack of wildfire smoke research, we don't know if the smoke can exacerbate autoimmune diseases like human-caused particulate matter does. 

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