GEOB370 Final Project

Wildfire Smoke and Public Health in BC

Spatial Analysis in Exposure Assessment and Health Implications

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Data
• Methodology
• Results I
• Results II
  
• Conclusions
• Limitations
• Future study
• Acknowledgements

Limitations

The following limitations should be taken into account when interpreting the results of this project:

Firstly, the basic unit for analysis in this project is local health area (LHA), which is relatively coarse. Both exposure and population health responses can vary dramatically within one LHA. By aggregating cases to a single measure of counts and averaging exposure across the whole area to one value for each LHA, the variance within LHA was hidden. Modifiable areal unit problem can occur since we are using the LHA population as the normalization denominator. If the unit of analysis is changed, there might be very different results in both the spatial distribution of case counts per 10,000 people and the regression.

Secondly, the health outcome measures used in this project is the absolute counts of prescriptions during the fire periods. It may be more relevant to associate the excess cases during that period comparing to data of before or after the fire periods, or, to a baseline from average values of previous years of the same period when there were no fires, if we would like to attribute the health outcomes to wildfire smoke.

Thirdly, monitoring stations measure the total concentration of PM2.5, without any distinguishment among the different sources. Using this measurement to assess the impact of wildfire smoke, we need to assume that wildfire smoke is the dominant source of PM2.5 during the fire periods. This may be true to some locations where wildfire has severe impacts but not the others with minor impacts.

Finally, possible factors that might have influence in the regression analysis such as weather conditions and the demographic characteristics of LHAs have not been examined in this project.