New research from the University of Vermont reveals exposure to smoke from Canadian wildfires in the summer of 2023 led to worsening asthma symptoms in children in Vermont and upstate New York.
New research from the University of Vermont reveals exposure to smoke from Canadian wildfires in the summer of 2023 led to worsening asthma symptoms in children in Vermont and upstate New York.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Environmental Health, is the first to examine the relationship between wildfire smoke and asthma in the Northeast—which in recent years has seen a marked increase in poor air quality days due to wildfires.
"In 2023 when we couldn’t see New York across the lake, a lot of Vermonters began to worry about wildfire smoke," says Anna Maassel, a Ph.D. candidate at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, graduate fellow at the Gund Institute for Environment, and lead author of the paper. "A lot of people think of Vermont as a relatively safe place to live when it comes to climate change, but we found that smoke coming from hundreds of miles away affected children here."
Read more at: University of Vermont
In this photo of Lake Champlain, take on June 23, 2025, wildfire smoke has turned the sky orange. (Photo Credit: University of Vermont's Spatial Analysis Lab)
