By Jen Christensen, CNN
(CNN) — Many millions of Americans and Canadians are breathing bad air right now due to smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires and additional wildfires in northern Minnesota.
If you’re in an affected area, it’s important to check air quality before you go anywhere this weekend, and keep certain items on hand to make life much more breathable when smoke is in the air.
Wildfire smoke is a dangerous mix of gases and tiny particles – including the biggest danger to human health, particle pollution called PM2.5, microscopic particles smaller than a width of a human hair that can get stuck deep in your lungs or even enter the bloodstream, leading to more health problems down the road.
Doctors are emphasizing the importance of minimizing your time in the smoke as much as possible.
How to check the air quality
Before you plan your day or go out, check AirNow.gov, says Dr. Rebecca Bascom, an attending physician who trains fellows in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Penn State.
“They do real-time monitoring, so you’re able to know where your area is at a specific time, so you have both forecasting where you can try to predict what you’re going to be up against,” she said. “Our access to information that we can use for our own health planning is so much better than it used to be.”
If AirNow.gov or your favorite weather app says the air quality is at an unhealthy red or the very unhealthy purple level, doctors recommend staying home.
“We really should be mindful that even if we don’t have any underlying lung disease, we can still have problems breathing, particularly in this environment with the wildfire smoke,” said Dr. Rubabin Tooba, a pulmonologist with a secondary specialty in critical care medicine at Northwestern Medicine Palos Hospital.
Prevention is always the best place to start with wildfire smoke, said Dr. Saema Tahir, a New York-based pulmonologist and critical care specialist.
“Rule of thumb: It doesn’t matter if you’re healthy or not, young or old. Avoidance is always the best practice,” she said.
A well-ventilated home
If you’re home, close your windows and doors and run your air-conditioning. Units in windows and above doors need to be “very, very nicely sealed,” Tahir said, so they don’t allow external air in.
Also make sure your home is well-ventilated, particularly in hot weather.
“Heat actually creates more particles that get into the air, and then you have the smoke on top of that. It really exacerbates all the particles we’re breathing in,” Tooba said. “It is key to be in spaces where the air is ventilated since air that’s stagnant, the particles are just staying in place, and that’s not good for us, either.”
To keep home air as clean as possible, use a HEPA filter. These air purification systems are designed to capture at least 99.97% of airborne particles, even the tiny ones like smoke, dust and dander, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Dr. Kirsten Koehler, a professor in the environmental health and engineering departments who Read more