‘Prevention is better than the cure’: Expert cautions against breathing in wildfire smoke

Experts are urging residents to take the air quality conditions seriously as it reaches dangerous levels. CTV News Edmonton's Amanda Anderson reports.

Shirley Arsenault said the smoke-filled air in Edmonton was not stopping her and her dog from being outdoors on Wednesday morning.

“We do this every single day, so regardless of the air. (It) depends on her,” Arsenault said while out playing catch with her dog at Buena Vista Park.

“She usually lets us know right away if she can’t breathe,” she added. “We haven’t had an issue.”

Bad air is something Arseneault said she is used to after moving to the city from Ontario a year ago.

“The weather was smog, the humidity (and) everything living in Windsor was just terrible,” she said, adding the smell of wildfire smoke was manageable in comparison.

“Coming out here … we can breathe this.”

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Paige Lacy, a University of Alberta professor in the Department of Medicine, said there are no studies showing the long-term impact of breathing in wildfire smoke because there has not been enough data.

“We’ve only really had it in the last 10 or so years that we’ve been getting pretty reproducible wildfire smoke seasons every summer,” Lacy told CTV News Edmonton on Wednesday. “It’s hard to know exactly what the long-term health consequences are.”

But she cautioned that “people are taking a pretty big chance” by being outdoors and breathing in the particles in the air.

“It has higher levels of compounds called PAHs which are (more) damaging to human health than cigarette smoke and so it’s pretty risky to be breathing it in for a whole day,” Lacy said.

“You want to try and stay out of it as much as you can.”

The long- term effects are something Winston Herbert finds hard not to think about after he quit smoking 15 years ago.

“I quit smoking … in hope that I wouldn’t have to wake up in the morning with sore lungs. And yet … here I am doing it quite often in the summer,” he said while walking his dog at the park on Wednesday.

He added that both him and his dog need the exercise, which makes it a difficult dilemma.

“We have no choice but to cut it a little bit short sometimes, especially on days like today when it’s really bad.”

Lacy recommends wearing a mask if the air quality health index is seven or higher and staying indoors. Wednesday morning’s index was reading 10+ (very high risk) according to the Environment and Climate Change Canada website.

“Some people get an instant reaction to it, but others can take hours before you actually realize, ‘Oh, this is too much for me. I can’t handle this.’ So this is why I think prevention is better than the cure,” Lacy explained.

“We really need to prevent our exposure as much as we can to avoid potentially causing damage down the line.”

She added that she has not seen any study that directly links wildfire smoke exposure to cancer, but she would not be surprised if there was an “uptick” from inhaling the smoke.

“There is a potential cancer risk in breathing wildfire smoke because of the fact that particles themselves, when they’re very small, can generate free radicals … which are inflammatory,” Lacy said, warning the chemicals can damage airways and possibly speed up natural lung function decline.

“Over many decades, your lung function will drop naturally and you could be accelerating that lung function decline if you continue to go out into thick smoke and breathe it during the summers.”

Something both Arseneault and Herbert said was hard to avoid while being outdoors at the park.

“(You) kind of get used to it because this is your new life. This is the way it’s going to be (and) certain days it’s going to be worse,” Arseneault said, recalling her move to the city during the first few days of the Jasper wildfire last June.

Herbert had similar sentiments.

“It is apparently the way things are now and I’m going to have to deal with it.”

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Amanda Anderson and Brandon Lynch