Canadian wildfire smoke causes 'very unhealthy' conditions in American Midwest and reaches Europe
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Hennepin Healthcare, the main emergency hospital in Minneapolis, has seen a slight increase in visits by patients with respiratory symptoms aggravated by the dirty air.
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Dr. Rachel Strykowski, a pulmonologist, said there is usually a bit of a delay before patients come in, which is unfortunate because the sooner those patients contact their doctors, the better the outcome. Typical symptoms, she said, include 'increase in shortness of breath, wheezing, maybe coughing a bit more, and flares of their underlying disease, and that's usually COPD and asthma.'
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What happens, Strykowski said, is that the fine particulate matter from the wildfire smoke triggers more inflammation in patients' airways, aggravating their underlying medical conditions.
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Strykowski noted that this is usually a time those patients can go outside and enjoy the summer weather because there are fewer triggers, so the current ones forcing them to stay inside can feel 'quite isolating.'
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People can protect themselves by staying indoors or by wearing N95 masks, she said. Strykowski added that they must be N95s because the cloth masks many people used during the COVID-19 pandemic don't provide enough filtration.
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Canada is having another bad wildfire season, and more than 27,000 people in three provinces have been forced to evacuate. Most of the smoke reaching the American Midwest has been coming from fires northwest of the provincial capital of Winnipeg in Manitoba.
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Winnipeg hotels opened Monday to evacuees. More than 17,000 Manitoba residents have been displaced since last week, including 5,000 residents of the community of Flin Flon, nearly 400 miles (645 kilometers) northwest of Winnipeg. In neighboring Saskatchewan, 2,500 residents of the town of La Ronge were ordered to flee Monday, on top of more than 8,000 in the province who had been evacuated earlier.
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In Saskatoon, where the premiers of Canada's provinces and the country's prime minister met Monday, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe said all of Canada has come together to help the Prairie provinces.
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Two people were killed by a wildfire in mid-May in Lac du Bonnet, northeast of Winnipeg.
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Canada's worst-ever wildfire season was in 2023. It choked much of North America with dangerous smoke for months.
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The smoke reaches Europe
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Canada's wildfires are so large and intense that the smoke is even reaching Europe, where it is causing hazy skies but isn't expected to affect surface-air quality, according the European climate service Copernicus.
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The first high-altitude plume reached Greece and the eastern Mediterranean just over two weeks ago, with a much larger plume crossing the Atlantic within the past week and more expected in coming days, according to Copernicus.
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'That's really an indicator of how intense these fires are, that they can deliver smoke,' high enough that they can be carried so far on jet streams, said Mark Parrington, senior scientist at the service.
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The fires also are putting out significant levels of carbon pollution — an estimated 56 megatonnes through Monday, second only to 2023, according to Copernicus.
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