SerpApi.Org
Trouble breathing. Wheezing. Coughing. Throat irritation.
Those were just some of the complaints residents of Toronto had last week, when the city earned the dubious distinction of having some of the worst air quality in the world.
The sky turned an eerie orange on Wednesday from fires burning hundreds of miles north in Ontario. Through Thursday, the air tasted like smoke and blurred the skyline.
At its worst, according to the Swiss air-monitoring company IQAir, the air in Toronto contained about 25 times the World Health Organization’s recommended level of fine particulate matter (PM).
Emergency department admissions on July 15 for shortness of breath, cough and non-cardiac chest pain doubled at the largest hospital system in Toronto, University Health Network, when compared to two weeks prior.
“It’s super scary, especially because so many of us have little control over whether we’re exposed,” said Samantha Green, a Toronto family physician and president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.
Breathing in wildfire smoke can irritate the eyes, nose and throat, cause headaches, dizziness, asthma attacks and even heart palpitations.
The young, the elderly, those with pre-existing conditions and those with high exposure levels — including the unhoused and outdoor workers — are most at risk.
“It’s pretty bad having to work outside,” said Zita Grant, who is a security guard in the passenger pickup area outside Toronto’s main airport. Grant has asthma and said the smoke makes it hard to breathe, even while wearing a KN95 mask that’s meant to block around 95% of airborne particles. “It’s a stifling feeling for sure. Plus, the mask, it’s no good.”
Even indoor workers were feeling the impact of Toronto’s smoke.
“The walk [from] the car to the restaurant was quite tough on my throat,” said Emily Pacheco, who works behind the register of a cafe in Toronto’s High Park. “It was very irritated; I was coughing a bit. So, I’m definitely trying to avoid being outside as much as possible.”
A ‘toxic soup’ of substances
Wildfire is made up of a “toxic soup” of different substances, according to physician Green, including tiny particles 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Because these particles — known as PM 2.5 — are so small, they can work their way deep into the lungs and even enter the bloodstream.
That can cause respiratory problems, or exacerbate existing conditions like asthma or chronic lung disease.
“It also can trigger an inflammatory cascade leading to heart attacks, to strokes, and we know that over time, it also causes problems in the brain,” Green explained.
Estimates suggest tens to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths each year can be attributed to wildfire smoke exposure. And the contribution of PM2.5 to pollution has been steadily rising globally, with the largest increase in North America.
Poor air quality combined with extreme heat, both of which Toronto saw last week, compounds the problem.
“Normally, people without air conditioning, they try to cool down their apartments at night by opening the windows,” Green said. “But when there is this really bad air quality, we don’t want to be doing that. So, it’s very difficult to cope.”
Fueled by warmer temperatures
The fires causing Toronto’s poor air quality are the product of a month of hot and relatively dry weather in Northern Ontario, according to Mike Wotton, a University of Toronto professor and longtime scientist at the Canadian Forest Service.
Those conditions make it easy for sparks from lightning or human activity to catch and spread.
“When fire gets spreading, it can be very intense, big flames, lots of energy released, lots of smoke produced,” Wotton said. “And so, that’s what we’re in.”
Climate change has meant hotter temperatures all over the world. Wotton points out that it does sometimes bring heavier rain, too. But it’s not enough to squelch fire risk.
“It takes an incredible increase in rain to offset just small increases in temperature, really,” Wotton explained. “And so, we’re seeing really what has been predicted for decades: that you will have overall drier fuels and you will have more challenging burning conditions, more intense fires.”
Trying to cope
The City of Toronto last week closed its pools and splash pads for a few days and canceled outdoor kids’ summer camps or moved them indoors.
It also advertised its “Cleaner Air Spaces,” six public buildings outfitted with high-efficiency air filtration systems where residents can seek refuge from the smoke. The program, launched in 2024, welcomes people to hang out in the lobbies of City Hall, Metro Hall and four civic centers.
Visits to two of these sites, however, showed that last Thursday, when the air was still smoky and acrid, no one seemed to be using the spaces for relief from wildfire smoke. In fact, no one, besides an employee at the City Hall information desk, knew these spaces were even designated as cleaner air spaces.
Howard Shapiro, a medical officer in the city’s health department, conceded the spaces are “not very well attended.”
Shapiro noted there’s not much to draw people into the lobby of a public office building or civic center, and the city is looking to expand the program to locations where there’s more to do.
Green treats patients at a downtown hospital and a women’s shelter, and suggested co-locating services like meal programs or housing services at these sites might draw more people in. Public funding for better at-home filtration could also improve indoor air quality for many residents, she said.
Still, Shapiro argued there is only so much the city can do to protect public health when the air is toxic to breathe.
“I think it’s a good demonstration that mitigation is the inferior option to prevention,” Shapiro said. “There are certain things you can do for a forest fire or heat wave, but there’s going to be additional health effects that arise, even with your best mitigation efforts, compared to not having it at all.”
In other words, “We need to tackle this at the root source,” said Green, the physician, “which is burning fossil fuels and causing climate change.”
To protect yourself during ever-lengthening fire seasons, public health officials recommend limiting time and exertion outdoors when the air quality is poor and wearing a good-quality, properly fitted mask.
Eric Kennedy, who teaches disaster and emergency management at York University, said that means bending the nose wire in the mask to fit snugly over the nose, and ensuring a flush fit along the cheeks and under the chin.
In the home, Kennedy advised installing the highest-quality air filter possible on your central air system, like your furnace or central air conditioner.
Even those who don’t have central air can purchase stand-alone air purifiers that pull air through a filter with a fan.
“Everybody needs to change how they’re thinking about [indoor air quality],” Kennedy said. “We honestly probably need a clean air indoor revolution for so many reasons, not just fire smoke.”
Hannah Chanatry contributed to this report.
The post Smoky skies in Canada raise public health concerns exacerbated by climate change appeared first on The World from PRX.
