Associated Press | "Study ties particle pollution from wildfire smoke to 24,100 US deaths per year"

The Associated Press interviewed Dr. Michael Jerrett, professor in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health's Department of Environmental Health Sciences, about research that links wildfire smoke exposure to tens of thousands of deaths annually in the United States.

"The paper, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, found that from 2006 to 2020, long-term exposure to tiny particulates from wildfire smoke contributed to an average of 24,100 deaths a year in the lower 48 states. 

“The estimates they’re coming up with are reasonable,” said Michael Jerrett, professor of environmental health science at the University of California, Los Angeles who was not involved in the study. “We need more of them. It’s only if we’re doing multiple studies with many different designs that we gain scientific confidence of our outcomes.”

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Along with decades of forest mismanagement, growing development in fire-prone areas has expanded the “urban wildland interface,” increasing wildfire risk with real consequences for human health, said Jerrett.

“Nobody’s going to have ‘wildfire death’ on their death certificate unless the fire actually burned them or a tree fell on them or something like that,” said Jerrett. “But many of the people that are dying from this exposure are ones that are already more vulnerable. These are real lives that are being lost. This is not some arbitrary abstract statistical concept.”

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The piece ran in more than 260 media outlets, including ABC News, the Washington Post, the San Jose Mercury News, and elsewhere.