Lethal haze from Indonesia forest fires ’caused 100000 premature deaths’

A thick, toxic haze from the man-made forest fire of Indonesia that suffocated the entire region of Southeast Asia for several weeks past year may have caused more than 100,000 premature deaths in the country.

The study has been welcomed by Indonesian medical scientists, who have for many years warned the government about the health hazards that forest fires pose to the public.

Researchers from Harvard and Columbia compared the likely health impact of the smoke that spread across much of the region a year ago to 2006, another exceptionally bad year for fires.

Last fall, Indonesia went through the worst outbreak of forest fires in almost two decades, as unusually warm and dry temperatures brought by El Niño exacerbated fire conditions.

On the other hand, the country’s disaster management agency said that an estimated 43 million people were exposed to the smoke and about half a million sought medical care for acute respiratory illness in Kalimantan Island and Sumatra alone.

The study considered only the health impact on adults and restricts itself to the effects of health-threatening fine particulate matter, often referred to as PM2.5, rather than all toxins that would be in the smoke from burning peatlands and forests.

The new estimate, reached using a complex analytical model, is far higher than the previous official death toll given by authorities of just 19 deaths in Indonesia.

According to the New York Times, the recent finding has piled pressure on the Indonesian government to look into the yearly forest fire. About 261,000ha of land were burned.

The study, published Monday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, attributed much of the worsening haze to more fires set to clear peatland-swampy soil that stores carbon and becomes highly combustible when drained to develop lucrative palm-oil and wood-pulp plantations.

It only looked at health impacts on adults and the effect of unsafe fine-particulate matter, known as PM 2.5.

Rajasekhar Bals, an environmental engineering expert at the National University of Singapore, told the Associated Press the study is hopefully a “wake-up call” for Indonesia to take action to curb the fires and for regional cooperation to deal with the fallout on public health.

While this is the first academic study of the 2015 Southeast Asian haze, previous research has shown the deadly consequences to human health of air pollution.

Dr Lee Yeow Hian, a respiratory and sleep physician at Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital, noted the difficulty in attributing deaths to haze “especially for people who already have pre-existing conditions like heart disease, or stroke”.

This year, the ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre (ASMC) reports that, after a spike in early September, the number of “hotspots”, indicating major fires seen by weather satellites, has fallen to below 20. The study said there is a high statistical probability that premature deaths ranged between 26,300 and 174,300. Its main estimate of 100,300 deaths is the average of those two figures. They estimated 91,600 deaths in Indonesia, 6,500 in Malaysia, and 2,200 in Singapore. Last month, Singapore was again blanketed in the toxic haze produced by Indonesia’s plantation industry’s “slash and burn” practices.

Shannon Koplitz, lead author of the study from Harvard’s department of earth and planetary sciences, said the goal of the research was to influence strategies for managing fires and land use to reduce smoke exposure. “In Singapore, if you close all the windows and turn on the air conditioning you get some protection, which may have happened”.