Carl Zimmer

Yeah.

So, you know, if you inhale smoke from a wildfire, you know, it's not going to start, you know, growing inside of you, but it, but those particles are going to cause a lot of,

damage.

They're going to cause a lot of inflammation.

They can cause not just lung damage, but they can potentially cause a bunch of other medical issues.

And unfortunately, climate change plus

the increasing urbanization of these kinds of environments, like in Southern California, where it's a fire ecology already, that is going to be a recipe for more smoke in the air.

We will be, unfortunately, seeing more fire.

You know, and, you know, we here in the Northeast, we were dealing with really awful smoke coming all the way from Canada.

So this is not a problem that respects borders.

And even if there were no wildfires, we still have a huge global terrible problem.

with particulate matter coming from cars and coal-fired power plants and so on.

Several million people, their lives are cut short every year, just day in, day out.

And you can see pictures in places like Delhi in India and so on.

There are lots of avoidable deaths in the United States as well because we're starting to realize that even what we thought were nice low levels of air pollution probably are still killing more people than we realized.

One way in which the aerobiome intersects with what we're talking about is that those little particles floating around, things can live on them.

And certain species can ride along on these little particles of pollution, and then we inhale them.

And there's some studies that seem to suggest that maybe pathogens are really benefiting from riding around on these particles.

And also, the wildfire smoke is not just lofting just bits of dead plant matter into the air, it's lofting vast numbers of bacteria and fungal spores into the air as well.

And then those blow very, very far away.