Wildfires' smoke making it tough on the lungs

Life has been bad for Blenda Baty since Colorado's wildfires began.

A severe and chronic asthma sufferer, the 46-year-old Denver resident first noticed smoke on June 9, a day when it hung thick over the city. She fought for breath on the short walk home from church.

"I felt like my lungs were going to burst," she said. "It was really, really rough."

Since then, she's been holed up in her home venturing out only when she must. Before the Hayman fire, she could walk a few blocks without labored breathing. Now she wheezes just moving from one room to the next. She's taking more medications to help her breathe -- including one that her doctors had earlier weaned her off because it weakens her bones.

For people such as Baty, smoke from the wildfires raging across Colorado and Arizona has brought a new kind of discomfort and fear. The fallout from a fire can be a serious health hazard to people with asthma, emphysema, chronic bronchitis or heart disease.

In recent days, state health departments in Arizona and New Mexico have issued health advisories to several communities downwind of several fires.

About 90 percent of the pollutants in smoke consist of microscopic particles, including tar, soot and other chemicals. They are so tiny they easily glide down the throat and lodge deep in lungs, clogging airways and triggering allergic reactions.

Major wildfires in 2000 produced 19 million tons of carbon monoxide nationwide, nearly one-fifth the amount emitted by smokestacks and tailpipes that year, and about 3 million tons of tiny particles, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

"Smoke from forest fires has a lot of respiratory irritants and toxic chemicals in it. It's a witch's brew of all kinds of things," said Dr. Michael Lipsett of the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.

There has been one known death attributed to smoke. Ann Dow, 50, of Teller County, Colo., died of a smoke-induced asthma attack shortly after the Hayman fire broke out.