The Effects of Wildfire Smoke Exposure on Human Health and Disease

California’s 2020 wildfire season was unprecedented: the total burned area—over 4 million acres—was the largest on record. The smoke produced by these wildfires impacted millions of people across the state and beyond, presenting an important opportunity to improve our understanding of the health impacts of acute wildfire smoke exposure. Sonoma Technology scientists are collaborating with researchers to better understand the human health impacts of that exposure through a study of the epigenetic changes. Fred Lurmann, Nathan Pavlovic, and Daniel King are working with Professor Lisa Barcellos, the project leader at the University of California, Berkeley, and other researchers at Stanford University and the National Human Genome Research Institute to study data collected from saliva sample pairs obtained in 2020 and 2021 from roughly 5,000 adults living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Due to the specific timing of the collected samples, the data set provides a unique opportunity to assess health indicators before and after exposure to the major smoke event that impacted the San Francisco Bay Area in the latter half of 2020. This project will focus on how exposure to fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) in smoke affects gene expression, which in turn can be linked to the initiation and progression of various diseases. To support the research, Sonoma Technology will develop a data fusion method to provide a high-resolution data set reflecting exposure to PM_2.5 from wildland fire smoke, as well as pollutant exposures from other sources, in 2020-2021.