HONOLULU– A University of Hawaii study on the health effects of last year’s deadly wildfires on Maui found that up to 74% of participants had difficulty breathing or otherwise had poor respiratory health, and nearly half showed signs of compromised lung function .
The data, collected from 679 people in January and February, comes from what researchers hope will be a long-term study of wildfire survivors that will last at least a decade. Researchers released the first results of that study on Wednesday. They hope to eventually include 2,000 people in their study so they can get a snapshot of the estimated 10,000 people affected by the fires.
Dr. Alika Maunakea, one of the researchers and a professor at the university’s John A. Burns School of Medicine, said those who reported higher exposure to the wildfire tended to have more symptoms.
Many study participants had not seen a doctor, he said. Some survey participants said this was not possible because clinics had burned down or because they prioritized housing, jobs and food after the disaster. Maunakea urged people exposed to the wildfires to get checked.
“There may be some problems in the future,” he said. “Please consult your doctor. This just makes you pay more attention to your health.”
Two-thirds of the study participants lived in Lahaina at the time of the fires. About half of participants reported daily or weekly exposure to smoke, ash or debris.
The August 8 fire killed at least 101 people, making it the deadliest wildfire in the US in more than a century. It burned thousands of buildings, displaced 12,000 residents and destroyed the historic city on Maui.
The report shows that Maui does not have enough lung health specialists to care for those who need this expertise, said Ruben Juarez, a professor of health economics at the university and one of the leaders of the study. Researchers are talking to Hawaii’s congressional delegation to figure out how to bring these resources to Maui, he said.
Maunakea said researchers want to avoid the higher cancer and death rates experienced 20 years later by people affected by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“Hopefully we can prevent this tragedy from worsening into higher death rates in the future, as we saw with other events like September 11,” Maunakea said.
Dr. Gopal Allada, associate professor of medicine specializing in pulmonary and critical care at Oregon Science & Health University, which was not involved in the study, said it would have been great if the study participants had undergone similar lung function tests before the fire. But he acknowledged that wasn’t possible, as is often the case in similar studies.
He hopes that the researchers will receive funding to continue their research in the long term.
Allada noted that most scientific studies on the health effects of wildfires have focused on what happens to people in the days and week of exposure, and less is known about the long-term effects.
He praised the researchers for showing there is a problem and for collecting data that can influence policymakers.
“This is important work that will hopefully influence policymakers and people who control budgets, train interns and things like that,” he said.