Best of: How to Protect Yourself from Wildfire Smoke
What's in wildfire smoke and how can you protect yourself from it?
Those are today's big questions, and my guest is Dr. Mary Prunicki.
Dr. Prunicki is the Director of Air Pollution and Health Research at Stanford University under the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research. Her lab examines the impact of air pollution and wildfires on health, specifically immune health.
Dr. Prunicki and I got together in late summer 2021 as fires and smoke just enveloped the American West and eventually the East Coast too.
Almost two years later, the west has seen a very wet winter and relative if temporary respite from fires, but Canada's on fire now, and everyone can see and taste the smoke as the jet stream carries it all the way across the continent.
So it's always a good time to understand how to protect yourself and your family, and that begins with understanding what you're protecting yourselves from, so we're rerunning this very popular and necessary conversation to make sure you and I, and all of us are up to speed all over again.
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INI Book Club:
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club
Links:
- profiles.stanford.edu/mary-prunicki
- Buy Purple Air monitor (or just look at the live map)
- How to Buy a *Real* N95 Mask
- EPA Air Quality & Climate Change Research
- California Air Resources Board
- American Lung Association on Outdoor Air Quality
- Stanford Center for Air Quality Research
- From Bloomberg: Wildfire's Toxic Legacy Leaves Children Gasping for Air Years Later
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- Edited by Anthony Luciani
- Produced by Willow Beck
- Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com
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