Hawaiʻi Wildfire Survivors To Join Long-Term Health Study

CHARLES BERGQUIST: This is Science Friday. I’m Charles Bergquist.

JOHN DANKOSKY: I’m John Dankosky.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: And I’m Kathleen Davis. Ira Flatow is out this week. And to give you an idea of how hard it is to fill his shoes, all three of us are sitting in for him.

CHARLES BERGQUIST: Coming up, we’ll look at the new telescope the European Space Agency plans to launch to search for exoplanets.

JOHN DANKOSKY: And we’ll explore the new frontier of cancer treatments.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: But first, California’s Park Fire has been burning since July 24, and it’s become the fifth largest wildfire in the state’s history. It’s burned more than 600 square miles in Northern California. And elsewhere, dozens of wildfires are also burning in Oregon, Washington, and throughout Canada. If it feels like there are a lot of simultaneous fires out West this year, it’s because there are. And climate change, unsurprisingly, seems to be making this worse.

Joining me to talk about this and other science stories of the week is my guest, Casey Crownhart, climate reporter at MIT Technology Review, based in New York.

Casey, welcome back to Science Friday.

CASEY CROWNHART: Thanks so much for having me.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK, Casey, let’s start off here with this Park Fire in California. What’s the latest?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah. So like you said, this is already breaking records as one of the largest wildfires in California’s history. So far, in just a couple of weeks, it’s burned almost 400,000 acres. And that’s around 600 square miles. This fire didn’t start naturally. A suspect has been arrested, after allegedly pushing a burning car down an embankment.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Wow.

CASEY CROWNHART: And officials say that seems to be what sparked this blaze. But it’s really taken off and burned really fast and really hot.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yeah. I mean, what were the conditions in California that led to this fire just picking up steam so fast?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah. I mean, it’s been pretty much perfect conditions for a wildfire. We’ve seen, really across the Western US and even Canada, heat waves, droughts. Also, strong winds have worked together to boost wildfires across the West this season. And we can really tie a couple of those conditions– the heat and that dry weather– to climate change, which is why, even though obviously somebody had something to do with starting this fire, we can also really point to climate change as a reason that it’s gotten so bad so fast.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: And as we said, there are lots of wildfires going on alongside this Park Fire. And there’s new information that posits that situations like we’re experiencing now is probably due to climate change, right?

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. I mean, we see heat waves, which really dry out vegetation, all of the droughts across the area as well. All of these conditions are really turning the West into just an absolute tinderbox for these wildfires. And so we’re going to probably keep seeing worse and worse fire seasons in the future.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: We’re thinking of everybody who is affected by all the wildfires going on right now. And I want to actually take us back in time to a wildfire from last year, the Maui fires. There’s a study going on that’s actually looking at long-term effects of these fires on the survivors. Tell me a little bit about this.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah. So last year– last August– there were devastating wildfires, like you said, on the island of Maui. That fire killed around 100 people. And survivors are still dealing with about $5 billion in damages on the island. But there are also really long-term health effects that we can come after these wildfires happen. And so researchers have just gotten funding a new long-term study to follow people after these blazes and see what kind of health effects they’re dealing with.

So this would be one of the biggest and one of the longest-term studies of its kind. Researchers have already enrolled over 800 participants to try and track their health after this fire.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: I mean, what specific health problems are they looking for?

CASEY CROWNHART: So, I mean, some of it is things that you would probably expect. So things like respiratory problems, also high blood pressure, other kinds of cardiovascular conditions, and things like mental health challenges as well. But because this is also a big and a long-term study, they’ll be able to check for other sorts of things as well. So they’re looking for things like different rates of different cancers and stuff like that as well.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yeah. I mean, how long into the future is this study going to go on?

CASEY CROWNHART: So they’re hoping to follow participants for at least a decade, maybe even two.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Wow.

CASEY CROWNHART: And it all depends on how much funding they’re able to get. They also say that they could have up to 2,000 total participants, including children, depending on if all that money comes through for them.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK. Let’s move on to another big news story from this week, this Listeria outbreak that’s broken out in deli meats. What’s the latest here, Casey?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah. So there’s a really, really big outbreak going on right now. And Boar’s Head has recalled about 7 million pounds of products across 71 products in its portfolio. And the reason is because of concerns about Listeria. So this is a foodborne illness that can make people sick and, in worst cases, be deadly. So officials have tied this outbreak to meat that’s been packaged between May and July in a food processing plant in Virginia. But the outbreak has already killed two people and hospitalized at least 33 across 13 states. So it’s a very, very big outbreak.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Wow. So how does Listeria spread?

CASEY CROWNHART: Listeria is actually a bacteria. And it can hang around in food processing plants. And if it gets into food like deli meat, which you don’t typically cook before you eat it, it can end up in your food and end up in your digestive system and end up passing into your blood and making you sick. In the worst cases, it can actually cross the blood-brain barrier. Which is why, though this is a somewhat rare condition– only about 1,600 people get sick across the US each year– it can be a very serious infection.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: So at this point, what are officials telling people to do?

CASEY CROWNHART: So if you have any of these products in your home, you can check the dates that they were packaged. There are certain codes on the packages that you can look at either the Boar’s Head website or the US Department of Agriculture website to get a full list of the affected products. And either throw them away or you can return them for a refund, but definitely make sure not to eat them.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK, let’s switch gears here, literally. There is some interesting news for our clean energy transition. In Baltimore, some people are actually using their electric trucks to power homes. Tell me about this.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yes, I love this story. So since electric vehicles have become more of a mainstream option for people, there has been more talk about using them to really help the grid. So we know that, especially in these hot summer months, there are times when the grid can get really stressed because we’re all turning on our air conditioners, getting home, turning on the TV at the same time, these early evening hours from 5:00 to 9:00 PM. And so what this Baltimore utility is doing, they’ve rounded up some owners of Ford F-150 Lightning trucks– so that’s the electric pickups– and if people have the right kind of charger and equipment, the utility is going to pay people to be able to take some of that energy out of that battery and help to power their homes.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: I mean, I usually think of this as the other way around, where your homes are powering the cars. So this seems like a pretty creative way to think about electricity transfer.

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. And that’s one of the big concerns that you always hear about electric trucks, or electric vehicles in general, is, is the grid ready? Is the grid ready? So this is a great example of where, if we’re a little bit creative, and instead of letting cars charge right when you plug them in when you get home, instead, maybe you use whatever capacity is left in the battery right when you get home, in that early evening time, and then charge it up overnight, when there’s much less demand on the grid, you can really solve some of these problems.

I’ll say that this study is very small. It’s just a few households right now. So we really need to see these kinds of programs expand to really have an effect.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Yeah, I was going to say, this seems like it’s really great if you’re one of these truck owners. But I mean, is this potentially sustainable on a bigger scale?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah. It can be tough to wrangle homeowners and utilities and the automakers that would need to be involved. So I think there’s a lot of work to do to scale this and make it more of an option for not just people who happen to own this kind of truck in this one place.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK, time to go to space for our next story, Casey. Some scientists have an interesting idea. They want to put a doomsday vault on the moon. Tell me about this. This is a very interesting story.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yes, I was fascinated by this as well. So people might be familiar with what is often called the Doomsday Vault, in Norway. It’s called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This is a seed bank that has millions of seeds. Basically, in case really bad things happen, we have a backup of all these seeds available. And the mountains in Norway seems like a great place to keep these things safe. But in 2017, there was a heat wave that melted some permafrost, flooded the seed vault. No seeds were lost, but it really got scientists thinking about how else could we put an insurance policy, say, on our future– store seeds, maybe even preserved animal cells.

And so, this week, a group of researchers put out a plan, suggesting that we should put these on the moon. If you were able to find a permanently shaded area that’s already cold, which can preserve these cells, you might be able to have a backup plan for the backup plan.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK. Well, we’ll see how that progresses, if it does. Very interesting story. So our last story, Casey, is about something that’s close to home for me. I have been having fruit fly problems this summer. They just love the bananas in my fruit bowl. And there’s a new study that points to them being actually smarter than we give them credit for. Tell me about this.

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. So while the fruit flies buzzing around your bananas might seem like they’re doing so just totally at random, researchers say that fruit flies actually have very specific strategies that they use when they’re looking for food. So we knew, in the past, if there’s wind, a fruit fly will fly into the wind and go back and forth, trying to follow the scent. But in this new study, researchers wanted to figure out what would happen if there’s no wind. How will fruit flies try to find a source of food? And they found that flies tend to sink down and fly in circles– this kind of downward spiral– to try and figure out where the smell is coming from and find your bananas.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: OK. So how exactly did these scientists do this?

CASEY CROWNHART: OK this, is my favorite part of the study because it’s actually kind of tough to deal with scents– like, clouds of chemicals that would trigger your smell– and so researchers actually set up these fruit flies with what they called a virtual reality for smell, sort of. Basically, they genetically modified flies so that, instead of their antenna being triggered by chemicals– so instead of smelling– they actually got triggered by light instead.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: What?

CASEY CROWNHART: And so they were doing little light flashes to give them the signal that food was close.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: Wow. That is super interesting. I mean, can we learn anything about these flight patterns to maybe put into practice in our own kitchens or in our own food storage areas?

CASEY CROWNHART: Great question. So the researchers said that one of the reasons that they were trying to study this is so that maybe we can get better insight into not only fruit flies, but more harmful pests like mosquitoes, which obviously spread a lot of disease and kill a lot of people every year. So hopefully we can learn more.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: All right. Well, that is all the time that we have for now. I’d like to thank my guest, Casey Crownhart, climate reporter at MIT Technology Review, based in New York. Casey, thanks, as always, for joining us.

CASEY CROWNHART: Thanks so much for having me. It’s always great to be here.