Wildfire smoke is loaded with microbes
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
From what I understand about the way things are done in the US most people don’t even wear a disposable P2. Hopefully articles like this start generating a conversation both within the fire services and amongst the people they protect.
The toxic chemicals from the smoke is definitely a problem but the microbes?
When we become a country of hypochondriacs?
Edit: The modern media is having a field day exploiting peoples misunderstanding of statistical likelihood to drum up all kinds of nightmares and terrors in peoples minds that have existed since the dawn of mankind but are now suddenly something to be terrified of.
And people who just follow along with whatever the mainstream says.. are eating it up.
> Take, for instance, the fungus genus Coccidioides, whose species live in soil. When a fire tears through a landscape, it disturbs the soil both directly, by chewing it up with flames, but also indirectly: All that hot, rising air creates an atmospheric void near the surface, and more air rushes in from the sides to fill it. This can produce fierce winds that scour the earth, aerosolizing the fungi.
> When firefighters inhale this rotten air, the fungi can lead to a condition called coccidioidomycosis, or valley fever, with symptoms including fever and shortness of breath. The condition may progress to cause pneumonia or meningitis, an infection of tissues surrounding the brain and spinal cord. (Infection by another fungus genus called Cryptococcus, also a concern in wildfire smoke, leads to similar symptoms.) Coccidioidomycosis is common enough among firefighters that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers the profession at-risk for the fungal infection.
I'm just going to say this:
There's microbes constantly in the air around you at all times that you're constantly inhaling, on every surface you touch, everywhere you go, every person you interact with. Billions or Trillions of different strains you encounter daily. Your skin is covered in microbes at all times. Your body has more microbes inside of it than it's own cells(google it).
At any point you could have a reaction to one of these but you don't because of your immune system.
Some people who have weak immune systems or are susceptible can have problems. BUT this is hugely statistically unlikely.
So for the media to be drumming up fears of microbes in the air is disengenuous and for people to be falling for it is truly something and says alot about the state of modern scientific education.
Now go into an area with decomposing bodies. The additional bacteria load will overwhelm most.
It's a little more complex qnd the way you explain it is how I would introduce the topic to my child. You may have billions of bacteria but if you introduce billions of different types you may not have the bacteriophages to deal with those types and your body may produce these as a defense (or not if your immune system is weak) but what happens in many cases your body may kill off beneficial bacteria and that gets replaced with a similiar but non-beneficial bacteria and because the phages changed you can't get back. We see this with fluoroquinolone antibiotics[1]
Davies EV, Winstanley C, Fothergill JL, James CE. The role of temperate bacteriophages in bacterial infection. FEMS Microbiol Lett. 2016;363(5):fnw015. doi: 10.1093/femsle/fnw015
I'm sorry that it makes you scared and fearful.
It upsets me that the media takes advantage of people's poor understanding of biology and statistics.
Forest fires are natural and happen all the time and are part of natural cycles of the forest.
What kind of forest management was happening to allow the fire to get that massive in the first place?
So you have government restricting freedoms to stop people from making mistakes created by the government in the first place.
Not a great pro-government argument.