As Canadian smoke chokes the air, Morristown Medical Center offers these safety tips

The haze drifting south from Canadian wildfires is posing hazards to persons with heart or lung disease, older adults, children and teens across the Northeast and northern New Jersey, according to AirNow.gov, a partnership of federal environmental agencies.

Morristown’s air quality on Tuesday evening was categorized as “unhealthy,” and it’s forecast to remain in this red alert status through Wednesday, June 7, 2023, the site reports. Our air is filled with particulate matter at 2.5 microns–a diameter orders of magnitude smaller than a human hair.

“PM2.5 is more likely to travel into and deposit on the surface of the deeper parts of the lung, while PM10 is more likely to deposit on the surfaces of the larger airways of the upper region of the lung. Particles deposited on the lung surface can induce tissue damage, and lung inflammation,” reports the California Air Resources Board.

Dr. Chirag V. Shah, director of pulmonary and critical care medicine at
Morristown Medical Center, offers these safety tips:

1. Stay informed on local pollution levels (color coded)
2. Stay indoors as much as possible
3. Avoid exercising outdoors right now. (We breathe two- to four times more per minute when we exercise and each breath can be more than twice as deep so we are at much higher risk inhaling large sums of particulate pollution in short periods of time.). In the meantime, try exercising indoors.
4. If you have a chronic lung disease, keep your inhalers with you and stay on all your medications.
5. Close windows
6. Use central cooling if possible
7. Change air filters. Use air purifiers, if necessary, as indoor air quality degrades during this time.
8. Cloth masks and even standard surgical masks won’t be terribly helpful for small particulate matter pollution. Try N95 masks if you have to be outdoors for sustained periods of time.