Breathing Fire: Exploring the relationship between ...

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Breathing Fire: Exploring the relationship between asthma and forest fire in California Joshua Baguley1, Hayat Srour1, Ruslan Fomenko1, Felix E. Rivera-Mariani, PhD1 1College

ABSTRACT The main focus of this project was to determine if there is a relationship between asthma-related emergency department (ED) visits and fires in the state of California. We aimed to pave way towards establishing a connection between natural disasters and respiratory distress. During our analysis we faced many obstacles, mainly data limitations and uncontrollable variables. After collecting and analyzing the available data, it was determined that there is no relationship between the rates of ED visits due to asthma and the amount of forest burned over 10 year time period (2006-2015). While we failed to establish a relationship in that regard, we determined that there is significant variation in asthma rates across regions of California.

of Biomedical Sciences, Larkin University, Miami, FL

FIGURES

Fig 1: California map by region

DISCUSSION

Fig 2: Table of mean acres burned and mean asthma rates for each region over 10 year period

LIMITATIONS

DATA

PURPOSE To explore the relationship between the occurrence of asthma in areas of high density of wildfires.

REFERENCES

Fig. 3: Rate of asthma per region from 2006-2015.

Fig. 4: Boxplot of asthma rates per year in the state of California.

Some fires crossed between counties; therefore, it was difficult to determine the appropriate values. Alpine county was also not included in the dataset due to the lack of data relating to asthma. The data available was in rates by year, not by month, which prevented us from evaluating within year variations. Also, the transient population of California made it difficult to get accurate numbers. The majority of asthma attacks also do not end in hospitalizations.

FUTURE IMPLICATIONS

Data on the emergency department visits due to asthma was collected from the California Environmental Health Tracking Program (http://www.cehtp.org/page/main). Data on forests burned by county was obtained from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (http://www.fire.ca.gov/). Fig. 5: Boxplot of mean acres burned per region.

With an r2 value of 0.04718 the data does not support our hypothesis that there is a relationship between the acres of forest burned and ED visits due to asthma in california. However, when examining the data, large variations in the mean asthma rates across regions was observed. By conducting a pairwise group comparison (with Bonferroni adjustment), is it was determined that there is a significantly higher average rate of asthma ED visits in the North region as opposed to the Motherload region.

Fig. 6: Regression analysis of asthma rate as a function of acres burned.

Future research should involve data on forest acres burned and asthma rates by month because certain times of the year are considered to be fire season. It would be useful to look into the rate of asthma medication instead of hospital visits, since most asthma symptoms can be alleviated by an inhaler and would be a better measure of asthma rates.