\u201cAs far as the eye could see, homes were on fire, everywhere,\u201d said firefighter Joseph Field, 50, who\u2019s been with the Los Angeles Fire Department for more than 25 years. \u201cNothing I\u2019ve ever seen was like it was that night.\u201d <\/p>\n

Field, manning a 10-inch hose line, dropped a curtain of water on a house that hadn\u2019t caught fire \u2013 yet. <\/p>\n

Even with goggles, the irritants in the smoke made his eyes feel like he\u2019d been wiping them with sandpaper. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re using basically a cloth hood to kind of help a little bit, but you\u2019re taking in a lot of smoke,\u201d Field said. \u201cYou\u2019re just eating it. You\u2019re constantly eating it.\u201d <\/p>\n

At one point, he had to back out and find a pocket of cleaner air on a porch. <\/p>\n

\u201cI could not breathe, and I was trying to catch my breath and coughing,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

The wind was so strong that the hose water streamed only about 2 feet before blowing right back on him. <\/p>\n

\u201cFinally, you just start to lose it. [The fire] starts to get into the house, despite your best efforts,\u201d he recalled. <\/p>\n

Field helped fight the fires for seven days in a row, went home for a day and then came back for eight more days. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not used to getting our butts kicked on a fire,\u201d he said. \u201cThis fire, for the most part, kicked all our butts.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Palisades Fire in Los Angeles in January ranks as the second-most destructive wildfire in Southern California history, with more than 23,000 acres and 5,000 structures burned. <\/strong>So many structures burned simultaneously, with so many unknown contents: plastics in furniture, batteries in cars. <\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of guys say it\u2019s probably a lot \u2013 couple years off our life \u2013 with the amount of stuff we took in,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can only take in so much bad stuff.\u201d <\/p>\n

Field is among 300 firefighters who are participating in a study to monitor their exposure to cancer-causing chemicals after the LA fires. <\/p>\n

Researchers with the Wildfire Conservancy and the University of Arizona have collected blood and urine samples from firefighters with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the LA Fire Department and other smaller departments. They\u2019ve also collected contaminant-absorbing wristbands the firefighters wore to measure their exposures. <\/p>\n

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<\/div>\n
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Skin contamination from particulate exposure with standard firefighting gear used by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.<\/span> <\/div>
Matt Rahn\/The Wildfire Conservancy<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
<\/div>\n
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A nearly 95% reduction in skin contamination from particulate exposure with experimental firefighting gear that has a protective layer built into the fabric.<\/span> <\/div>
Matt Rahn\/The Wildfire Conservancy<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The samples are being tested for carcinogens associated with wildfires that burn into urban areas. <\/p>\n
The first set of preliminary results from the ongoing investigation found that 42 firefighters who worked the LA fires had significantly higher concentrations of certain chemicals called PFAS in their blood. It is not clear whether these changes will be linked with health problems, according to the researchers. Also, an analysis of heavy metal exposures shows elevated levels of key metals, including chromium, arsenic and cobalt. <\/p>\n
Separately, a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released in February found a brief 110-fold increase in air lead levels during the LA fires. The health effects from these exposures are not well-understood, the agency said, noting that many of the buildings affected were built before 1978, when lead paint was still commonly used. <\/p>\n
At peak, more than 6,000 firefighters worked the Palisades incident. <\/p>\n
\u201cThese are 9\/11-scale exposure events for firefighters,\u201d said Matt Rahn, executive director of the Wildfire Conservancy. <\/p>\n
Exposure to carcinogens in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks has been linked to heightened risk of cancer. According to the New York City Fire Department, 3,500 firefighters have cancer related to their work in the World Trade Center. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to understand better as to the air and the soil and the water contamination that are specific to LA,\u201d Dr. Kari Nadeau, chair of the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in January during a public health discussion about the smoke. \u201cI don\u2019t want to say that anything is the same as LA, because LA will be LA.\u201d <\/p>\n
A mixture of toxicants<\/h2>\n
Two-thirds of firefighters die from job-related cancer, according to the International Association of Firefighters. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a pretty stark statistic, but it\u2019s the reality of what we deal with in the fire service as a result of our occupational exposures,\u201d said Derek Urwin, the association\u2019s <\/strong>chief science adviser. \u201cAny exposure to products of combustion increase cancer risk, and [the Los Angeles fires] were obviously quite substantial exposures.\u201d <\/p>\n
Wildland firefighters are also regularly exposed to carcinogens; at least 29 have been linked to this type of fire, according to a 2024 study by US Forest Service researchers. <\/p>\n
Wildland firefighters who battle blazes that spread into urban areas are exposed to even more hazardous emissions from the burning of both natural and human-made fuels. <\/p>\n
Then, after the initial incident, these firefighters encounter \u201coff-gassing,\u201d the release of harmful gases from everything that combusted in the rubble, which can last days or even weeks. <\/p>\n
All of this makes the Southern California fires, with their mixture of toxicants, more complicated than either wildland or structure fires, according to Jooyeon Hwang, an associate professor and occupational health researcher at UTHealth Houston who has researched the health risks to firefighters from wildfire smoke. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe really do not understand fully yet about the long-term effects of these exposures to the carcinogens,\u201d she said. \u201cWe definitely need more studies.\u201d <\/p>\n
It can take decades for cancer to develop after exposure to carcinogens, Hwang said. <\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s say you are exposed to these carcinogens at age 20. Then, maybe 40 or age 50, you might find those cancers,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
Interventions to reduce cancer risk<\/h2>\n
In addition to helping firefighters understand and predict their cancer risk, the Wildfire Conservancy is studying interventions that can be put in place now. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s not feasible for wildland firefighters to wear full-face respirators with filter cartridges and battery packs while hiking with 40-plus pounds of gear in terrible conditions, so they may have only a bandana or shroud to protect their airways. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s not a respiratory protection device. It\u2019s letting everything through except big chunks of ash,\u201d Rahn said. <\/p>\n
Plus, the respirator cartridges aren\u2019t certified to protect against the type of smoke encountered by these firefighters. Even high-quality N95 masks become unusable very rapidly. <\/p>\n
\u201cAll the cartridges that are out there are certified and tested against single-gas challenges,\u201d Urwin said. \u201cThe issue with smoke is, it\u2019s an extraordinarily complex mixture of many, many, many, many gases. And the issue with just relying on a respirator is, we don\u2019t know how effective they are against smoke exposures, if at all.\u201d <\/p>\n
For the past year, conservancy researchers have been conducting field tests to evaluate the effectiveness and functionality of different types of respiratory devices. They want to consider firefighters with stubble and sunscreen and ash and soot and smoke and sweat. <\/p>\n
The conservancy is also investigating clothing that contains an added barrier to filter out tiny particles. In lab tests, researchers have seen up to a 95% reduction in skin contamination from firefighting with the use of these clothes. <\/p>\n
When Field came home after the first seven days of fighting the Palisades Fire, he soaked his brush coat in a bucket of water and detergent. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt looked like oil, sludge,\u201d he said. \u201cAll those carcinogens, get \u2018em off you.\u201d <\/p>\n
When he got some downtime recently, he took a drive through the Pacific Palisades, back to another street of homes that his team had showered with water. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere were homes that, if we had not put a stand on those homes, they definitely would have burned down, and if those homes burned down, they would have burned a lot more homes,\u201d he said. \u201cWe actually did save a number of homes.\u201d <\/p>\n
That, he said, was good to see. <\/p>\n
He\u2019s not focusing on whether the cost of saving those homes might mean cancer down the line. <\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t try to build too much into stuff like that,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen I\u2019m faced with that kind of stuff, then that\u2019s another story, and I\u2019ll deal with it when that happens.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>\n
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Pacific Palisades was burning to ash. \u201cAs far as the eye could see, homes were on fire, everywhere,\u201d said firefighter Joseph Field, 50, who\u2019s been with the Los Angeles Fire Department for more than 25 years. \u201cNothing I\u2019ve ever seen was like it was that night.\u201d Field, manning a 10-inch hose line, dropped a curtain of water on a house that hadn\u2019t caught fire \u2013 yet. Seven feet away, the neighboring home was going up in smoke. Even with goggles, the irritants in the smoke made his eyes feel like he\u2019d been wiping them with sandpaper. \u201cYou\u2019re using basically a cloth hood to kind of help a little bit, but you\u2019re taking in a lot of smoke,\u201d Field said. \u201cYou\u2019re just eating it. You\u2019re constantly eating it.\u201d At one point, he had to back out and find a pocket of cleaner air on a porch. \u201cI could not breathe, and I was trying to catch my breath and coughing,\u201d he said. The wind was so strong that the hose water streamed only about 2 feet before blowing right back on him. \u201cFinally, you just start to lose it. [The fire] starts to get into the house, despite your best efforts,\u201d …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3401,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wellnessdigest4u.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wellnessdigest4u.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wellnessdigest4u.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wellnessdigest4u.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wellnessdigest4u.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wellnessdigest4u.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wellnessdigest4u.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wellnessdigest4u.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wellnessdigest4u.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wellnessdigest4u.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}