Researchers have used air quality and public health data to estimate the health care costs associated with smoke exposure in California from 2012 through 2018.<\/p>\n
Health economist Daniel Cullen, who recently earned his doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that each additional day of wildfire smoke led to roughly $188,000 in medical expenditures for respiratory and circulatory hospitalizations per county, as averaged across all the counties and years in his study.<\/p>\n
The total cost in California over the entire period he studied came out to over $1.3 billion.<\/p>\n
To calculate his estimate, Cullen multiplied the increased number of respiratory and circulatory cases by the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimate for what an average case costs, and adjusted for inflation. He compared each county to itself in the same month over the course of different years. This allowed him to control for many confounding factors that could have crept in had he compared dissimilar counties. This technique also accounts for conditions that affect all counties equally, like a really bad flu season<\/a>.<\/p>\n
“It’s not just changing the timing,” he says, “it’s actually increasing the number of cases.”<\/p>\n
Pandemic aside, the cost of smoke exposure is on track to continue rising. The climate crisis is increasing the size, frequency and intensity of wildfires. “These healthcare costs need to be accounted for when we’re thinking about the costs of climate change<\/a>,” Cullen says.<\/p>\n
“Health care costs from California’s fires carry across state lines,” he says. Thanks to the prevailing winds, the pollution<\/a> has even reached cities on the East Coast. “These fires are affecting the health of people throughout the country.”<\/p>\n
Source: UC Santa Barbara<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"