Up in Smoke

Hey, wait, you're listening to Radiolab from WNYC?

Hey.

So people will start one after another, groups will start round after round, and you just keep going until the fire is lit.

And what does it mean? Like, what do the words say?

The fire is burning, the fire is burning, this group of people are singing.

Hey, I'm Molly Webster and I'm your host. Today, I want to tell you a story that involves two people on the opposite ends of the same mystery. The first person is Lita Kobziar. You just heard from her singing. She is a scientist who studies fire wildfires in the remote backcountry of places like Idaho and Utah.

We got a call in infection prevention that there were an unusual number of mold infections and they were all burn patients.

So wow, that a person can grow mold on them.

Yeah, from different places in their body, so sometimes in their blood, sometimes like in their tissue tissue. People who have like skin injuries, like burn patients, they can actually get mold sitting on the tissue where the skin has been lost. So it might look kind of yellowish and can be kind of fluffy sometimes.

So the patients that you got called about, did you say they were all burn patients?

They were, yeah.

How many were there?

So it doesn't sound like a lot. But it was about six in a month, which normally you might see one in a month or less. And they were all different molds.

So each person had a different fungus.

Some people had more than one.

Whoa, okay.

And it just didn't make sense. Because normally, when you see an outbreak in a hospital, like, say, there's a contaminated equipment or something like that. You would see that everyone has the same infection, but this was weird because everyone had different infections.

So they come to you, they're all different molds, like. Their question is, is the hospital infected?

Yeah, because we have to know so that we can fix it and so we had to go through all the normal steps. Like, look for that moldy sink or that moldy towel that somehow fell behind something and it wasn't cleaned up or something like that. We couldn't find anything, so then we had to keep looking okay.

By we do you mean I?

Yeah, it was me and some of the environmental services people we got into, the kind of in between floors, in the ceiling.

Wow.

To look at the air filter system to make sure that was working. And what we learned was that the air filters were getting so overwhelmed by the wildfire smoke that they were just black and the motors were shaking.

Oh my gosh.

Which was totally unexpected because we had never really had a wildfire season that bad before. So then I thought, Could this have something to do with it?

Like in a movie about an apocalyptic disaster.

It felt like that, it looked like that, and it felt like that.

Meaning like people could be exposed before they even walk in the door.

Yeah.

Hmm.

So then that's when I thought I should start looking into this question is there stuff in smoke that can cause infections?

I was born to Ukrainian immigrants who immigrated after World War II as Ukrainian American kids, we all grew up at Ukrainian scouting camps. And we learned to survive in the woods. And we learned to use plants, how to build traps for trapping small animals, how to collect water, learn to build fires and control and use fire. You know, we'd always sing a song to make the fire light. The song is really about celebrating fire.

Can you just introduce yourself to me on tape?

I'm lita kobziar.

Kobziar.

That's perfect.

Okay, great.

I would call myself a fire ecologist, okay?

Tell me, like, what a fire ecologist does day to day?

Well, I guess I would first say that it's different. For every fire ecologist myself, I've really been interested in fire effects on plants and the soils that are the foundation for plants.

So then how did the?

I guess I could tell you the whole origin story if you want to hear it. Yeah, okay, yeah, it was a Friday.

You know the date? Oh, I love that.

That's because I taught fire ecology every Friday and every Friday that the weather conditions were right. We would conduct prescribed burns on our school forest at the University of Florida. So you spend a lot of time standing around the fire, just kind of looking at it the same way you do with a campfire.

What a fun class.

Oh, it's such a fun class, yeah.

You can see an oil.

Exactly.

I don't know how one sees that.

Well, there are amazing plants that are evolved to burn, they do what we call glass up. Basically, the volatile oils in the plants get moved to the surface of the plant and then it combusts. Oh my gosh.

Okay, so there's lots to stare at when a burn is happening.

Yeah.

In smoke.

Yeah.

Meaning, if bacteria can help make snow and is in snow, could bacteria be in smoke, helping to make fog?

Exactly, and we were heading out on a prescribed burn the next week. And so we created an experiment and found a graduate student who really needed a project and had, I think, a month or two to finish her thesis. And she worked to design a sampling mechanism that would allow us to hold up petri dishes to the fires that we were burning on Fridays. So we suspended the petri dishes and had teams of students at different distances from the fire and downwind in the smoke.

Did you grow stuff?

Yeah, we grew hundreds and hundreds of colonies.

You grew hundreds and hundreds of stuff from smoke.

Yeah, yeah, and it grew fast, and it was both bacteria and fungi.

You're saying it so casually, but I had no idea. So, in smoke there's living bacteria.

There's living bacteria in smoke. Yep, absolutely. And in comparison to what we saw in the ambient air, the air that wasn't affected by smoke, it was about an order of magnitude difference.

What is an order of magnitude?

Like Times 10.

There's that much more stuff floating in the smoke as just normal air.

Yes, at least. Whoa, Yeah, and now I know that that number is probably bigger.

But what do you think the number is now?

Somewhere between, I don't know, 20 and 100 times as many.

There could be 100 times as much stuff in smoky air as in non-smoke alive stuff.

Potentially, yeah.

What was growing, what bacteria, what fungi?

A lot of different. Fusarium, cryptococcus, oreobasidium, altonaria, cladosporium, molassesia.

How? how is bacteria and fungi not devoured in the fire? And I just don't even understand how it's even still in a bacteria form, let alone still living, because I think fire hot.

Right, and it certainly is hot.

Thank you for that validation.

So there's a lot of variability in what's happening at every scale. In a fire, there might be a little depression in the Earth, where the air temperature is a little bit cooler, and then nothing in that little depression burns. And you can consider that as a type of fire refugia.

Wow, okay.

So it's just more variable than we think.

Even though you're surrounded by hotness, you don't necessarily, as a living being, have to burn.

Exactly, you know, you can get entire branches, tops of trees, or even whole trees that get swept up into the uplift of the winds that are created by the fire.

Can we say it's like a leaf? Can we make it like a little more friendly?

Sure, it's a happy little leaf from an aspen tree.

Oh, love, okay.

And so that little piece of leaf that's left over, just like the little pieces of wood and things that you find in your campfire. At the end of the fire, that little piece of leaf gets picked up in those winds.

It's like the roof on its house just got ripped off.

Yeah, exactly.

And now it can get sucked out like in twister.

Exactly.

Wow, and did you like, take your news to people? were you like, Oh my God? We developed these petri dishes that we grew all this stuff on. That came out of smoke and people thought, why didn't I do that?

You know, I think a lot of people thought it was kind of cool, but didn't really think about the implications.

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Yeah.

What ended up happening to those patients, to the six?

Three patients died in the hospital.

From the mold, not the burns.

So, the factors that most determine mortality in burn patients are age and burn size. And the larger the burn size, the higher the risk is of getting an infection and especially a fungal or mold infection. We can't say for sure that those infections came from the wildfires, but we can say that it correlated.

Wow.

Yeah, the thing is, there are so many questions we don't have answered about wildfire smoke that I think we need to answer.

What are ones you're thinking of?

Well, I mean, what I'm really worried about is how infectious are these organisms, how many are there and where are they going? Because I want to know, I think, you know, for my patients and for myself, I want to know. Are these infections that I should expect to see? And as we have more exposure, should we expect to see them in people we don't typically expect to see them in? You know, can they start showing up in healthy people? Because we're just covered in more of it than we were before.

So last summer, Canadian wildfires sweep into New York City. Or like the smoke of the Canadian wildfires kind of settles over New York City, settles over most of the Midwest. Am I in that moment being? Is Canadian fungus like raining down on me Canadian bacteria? is it landing in my garden? am I snuffing it into my nose?

I don't know, you know, I imagine that some of it is, but we really don't know at this point how much. I mean, I think from the very beginning, when I told people about this work, that pretty much is. The first question, you know, is, what does it mean for human health? And so then, you know? I look back at the list of fungi that we sequenced from a given smoke sample, and I see that there are three on the list that are human pathogens. And the connection is made.

Lita and her colleagues have seen things that are scary for humans and things that are scary for animals, but they've seen way more of other things. Like bacteria that love nitrogen and help trees grow, a type of fungus that helps things break down on the forest floor, like dead plants and animal bones, bacteria that keep the oceans healthy, and fungus whose cousin is used to make antibiotics. And others who love salt and heat, it's all up there, floating in the smoke.

This is just a very, very new and different way of looking at what smoke is, to think of smoke as, essentially, you know, having life in it, or being alive. In a way, I think, really changes the way that we think about the perimeter of a fire. You know, it is no longer just affecting the life within it, it's also potentially transporting life across long distances.

This episode was reported by me, Molly Webster. It was produced by Sindhu Nanasambandhan and edited by Pat Walters. There was production help by me and Timmy Broderick, our once and former intern. Thank you so much to Lita Kobziar and Naomi Hauser. I did want to give a shout out to Lita's original research. When she first started sticking petri dishes near the flaming front.

Hi, I'm Emma and I live in Portland, Maine. Here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio.

Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Science Sandbox Assignments Foundation Initiative and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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