"As regulations have reduced prenatal exposure to harmful emissions from vehicles and industry in recent years, smoke from climate-fueled wildfires is erasing air quality gains."
"In 1965, a presidential advisory panel issued a report warning that pervasive chemical and carbon pollution was harming environmental health and changing the climate. Five years later, President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act.
Since that 1970 law and its amendments were passed, combined emissions of a half dozen harmful air pollutants from vehicles and industrial sources have decreased by nearly 80 percent.
But mounting evidence shows that pollution from wildfire smoke is eclipsing those air-quality gains. The unchecked burning of fossil fuels is creating warmer, drier conditions that make wildfires more intense and destructive, and blanket communities in toxic smoke that is more harmful than pollution from other sources.
Now, a new study shows that smoke from wildfires is also reversing the health benefits of reducing air pollution for society’s most vulnerable population: babies in the womb."
