Texans Cope With Smoke From Fires in Mexico
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.
HOUSTON -- With a tickle in the throat, an itch in the eye and a bit of a wheeze in the lungs, Texans have been coping with an extraordinary weeklong health alert brought on by smoke and haze from uncontrolled fires thousands of miles away in Mexico.
Last week, state environmental authorities declared the air unhealthy in counties stretching 100 miles inland from the Gulf Coast, where pollution from fires in southern Mexico was casting a gray pall.
On Friday, the alert was extended to the whole state. And while the weekend brought some relief to some areas, forecasters said more smoke might be on the way.
As a precaution, health agencies warned the elderly and people with heart disease or lung ailments to avoid outdoor activity and to take it easy indoors. Everybody, especially children, was advised to avoid prolonged exercise.
"It makes sense for everyone to be cautious," said William Archer, the commissioner of the Texas Department of Health. "But we should not move people to panic."
In that spirit, and with a touch of irony, the American Lung Association canceled its fund-raising event on Saturday, a "Run to Fight Asthma." People with asthma are especially vulnerable to air pollution.
For the healthy, the warnings and the pollution were more an irritation than an emergency.
In Corpus Christi, organizers went ahead with a 26-mile relay race for nearly 7,000 participants.
Nina Sisley, director of the local health department, had advised against the race.
"My concern is that these people are putting themselves in harm's way," Sisley said. "Some will be running six to eight miles and may not recognize the danger of breathing these tiny particles associated with the smoke that embed themselves in the lungs. They could develop real upper respiratory problems later."
But the city's legal department told her she had no authority to prevent the race, which proceeded without any evident health problems.
Health experts said, however, that this kind of haze, with its minuscule chemical particles carrying toxic and carcinogenic compounds deep into the lungs, was not to be ignored, even if it was not possible to say with any certainty what specific harm was being done by a week of breathing the polluted air.
In Mexico itself, scores of people have died and at least 50 million have been left choking in smoke from nearly 10,000 fires. A cloud of haze and cinders has hung over most of southern Mexico and much of Central America since early last month. Airports have been closed in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador, and almost all flights in and out of the region have been canceled.
Some environmental advocates and scientists said that the resulting problems in Texas, coming on the heels of more distant fires in Indonesia, Brazil and other parts of the world in the past two years, were a sign of a more widespread phenomenon that people should worry about over the long term.
They said that the Mexico fires, exacerbated by a drought brought on by the El Nino weather pattern of the past two years, might be linked to global warming caused by rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.
For years scientists have said that if global warming accelerates it could lead to a variety of health problems, including air pollution from fires and the spread of diseases.
"This may be a wake-up call for what global warming is going to bring us in the 21st century," said Neil Carman, clean air director for the Sierra Club. "Is it some kind of isolated event? I don't think so. It seems to be part of something much much bigger."
Kevin Trenberth, the head of the climate analysis section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a government laboratory in Boulder, Colo., said it was reasonable to view events like the haze in Texas as "sort of a warning sign" about what people may experience because of the greenhouse effect.
"There is an excellent analogy between El Nino and the kind of effects that people will experience with climate change," he said in a telephone interview. "These effects are going to become more pervasive with climate change. Drying is likely to become more common, droughts more severe and longer lasting, and this will make vulnerability to fire more pronounced."
A more difficult question to answer, and one that Trenberth is studying closely, is whether climate changes already under way are increasing the intensity and frequency of El Nino events -- the periodic swings in temperature patterns in the Pacific Ocean that cause widespread effects worldwide.
All that sounded farfetched to one jogger who was out in the noonday heat on Saturday.
Like hundreds of other Houstonians seeking exercise, Tom Sikorsky, 50, unfazed by the health warnings, went for a jog with his wife, Frances, along the trails of Houston's Memorial Park. Both of them wore blue masks to filter the pollution, although the health agencies said this would do little good against the tiniest particles of haze.
Sikorsky, an industrial safety engineer, rejected the idea that a larger environmental issue was at stake, calling fears of global warming a "Chicken Little mentality."
On CBS affiliate KHOU in Houston, Dr. Richard Castriotta, a lung specialist from the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, advised callers to take caution but said that the situation "is unpleasant, but has not yet been demonstrated to be unhealthy."
He told tourists that it was fine to take their children to a local amusement park and told the father of an infant not to worry about taking the baby outside in a stroller. But he advised the mother of a healthy boy with a history of pneumonia that it might not be wise to let him play in a soccer game, and he told a man with asthma not to ride his bicycle.
In Brownsville, Dr. Robert LeKach, an allergist, said his patient load had increased 20 percent since the haze arrived. Some were new clients, some his regulars.
"Basically we're dealing with a lot of asthma and allergic conditions," LeKach said. "They're coming in complaining of nasal irritation, nasal bleeding and eye burning. The ones that are treated and take their medication usually can withstand it. Those who are less controlled usually react. The people that are on the edge, it kind of tips them over."
At Su Clinica Familiar, a community health clinic in Harlingen, about 30 miles from the Mexican border, Dr. Elena Marin said children who had never had such problems before had come in coughing and wheezing.
"My own son woke up doing that, and he's never been diagnosed," she said.
Marin said her patients, most of whom are poor, were less able to seek proper asthma treatment and stick with it.
"Many of their homes don't have air conditioners," she said. "They may have broken screens. If they can't close the windows they would be more at risk for environmental exposure."
Marin said she had forbidden her 6-year-old daughter to attend an all-night campout on school grounds on Friday night.
"I'm not willing to go out there," Marin said. "My daughter was so disappointed, but I told her, we don't want to get sick."
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)