Awareness of wildfire smoke among U.S. adults with and without asthma

To describe awareness of ambient wildfire smoke among U.S. adults with and without asthma.

We analyzed data from the summer wave of the 2021 ConsumerStyles survey, a nationally representative survey of 4085 U.S. adults. Respondents self-reported their asthma status and awareness of wildfire smoke where they lived in the past 12 months. We linked survey responses by zip code of residence with satellite-detected wildfire smoke plume data that estimated the daily maximum smoke plume density over the preceding year. We estimated associations between asthma status and awareness of wildfire smoke across categories of maximum smoke plume density and days with medium- or heavy-density smoke as prevalence ratios (PRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) using predicted marginal probabilities from logistic regression models.

Over 98% of the estimated population of U.S. adults lived in a zip code affected by ≥1 day of medium- or heavy-density wildfire smoke, which occurred on an average of 16 days in the past year. Awareness of wildfire smoke was reported by 19% of U.S. adults and was higher among adults with than without asthma (PR: 1.25; 95% CI: 1.01, 1.55), including in zip codes affected by heavy-density smoke (PR: 1.30, 95% CI: 1.04, 1.63) and with 22 or more days of medium- to heavy-density smoke (PR: 1.22, 95% CI: 1.01, 1.47).

Although awareness of wildfire smoke was higher among U.S. adults with than without asthma, low percentages of awareness overall indicate a need for health communication about wildfire smoke and its health risks.