1) Study estimates 2023 Canadian wildfire smoke caused 82,000 premature deaths globally

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Canadian Press Staff, September 11, 2025

Study estimates 2023 Canadian wildfire smoke caused 82,000 premature deaths globally

Smoke from wildfires fills the air in Kelowna, B.C., Saturday, Aug. 19, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Smoke from record-breaking Canadian wildfires in 2023 caused an estimated 5,400 acute deaths and about 82,100 premature deaths worldwide, a new study shows.

The study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature acknowledges some variation in mortality estimates depending on the methods used, but says its overall conclusion is the smoke led to an “enormous and far-reaching” health burden.

Canadian co-author Michael Brauer says the findings serve as a “wake-up call” for areas that haven’t typically seen repeated or prolonged exposure to wildfire smoke.

The health impacts will only increase with worsening climate change, he says, and understanding them is crucial for managing the risk and protecting people.

“While there is room for improved forest management and fire suppression … we’re still going to get a lot of smoke,” says Brauer, a professor in the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia.

“So we need to learn how to live with it and I do believe we can live with it.”

The international research team used several computer models and data sources to produce estimates of the number of deaths attributable to the particulate pollution, known as PM2.5, from Canada’s worst-ever wildfire season.

Of the estimated 82,100 premature deaths due to continuous exposure to the smoke over several months, the paper says 64,300 occurred in North America and Europe, including 33,000 deaths in the United States and 8,300 in Canada.

It says the overall figure represents 0.9 per cent of total deaths related to PM2.5 globally in 2023.

Brauer says the premature deaths represent the chronic impacts of wildfire smoke, which interacts with pre-existing risk factors and conditions, such as heart or lung disease, to potentially contribute to shortening a person’s life.

“This is sort of the slow accumulation of pollution exposure,” says Brauer, whose co-authors were based in China and the United States.

The period between June 26 and July 7, 2023, was especially smoky, causing an estimated 5,400 acute deaths in the United States and Canada, the paper says.

The study shows the chronic impacts were far greater than the acute effects, Brauer says, referring to increased ambulance dispatches, emergency room visits and hospitalizations that occur during or shortly after a smoke event.

That’s a significant finding, he says, because severe wildfire seasons are becoming more frequent with climate change.

“We’re seeing, with a warmer climate, that we’re getting kind of record or close-to-record fire seasons repeatedly every summer,” he says.

“That’s going to contribute to increased numbers of people dying prematurely.”

While smoke from wildfires in Canada’s vast forests has caused health impacts across continents, Brauer says the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change and its impacts, including severe wildfires, are a global problem.

Canada’s 2023 fire season shattered records, with more than 6,000 fires scorching 150,000 square kilometres, according to Natural Resources Canada, while this year is the second-worst season on record, burning more than 83,000 square kilometres.

The study says the wildfires in Canada accounted for 13 per cent of global fire-related exposure to fine particulate matter in 2023, but the Canadian blazes had an outsized impact as smoke spread across North America and western Europe.

The smoke that ended up in parts of Europe wasn’t highly concentrated, but it affected areas with high population density, Brauer says.

The researchers identified “Canada smoke days” during which daily mean concentrations of PM2.5 exceeded the World Health Organization guideline and the Canadian fires accounted for at least half the average concentration over 24 hours.

Using those criteria, the study found 354 million people in North America and Europe were exposed to at least one “Canada smoke day” in 2023.

In Canada, the paper says 98 per cent of the population experienced such a day, with an average of 27.1 smoke days per person.

In the United States, the figure was 267 million people. In Europe, it was 47.7 million people, a number larger than Canada’s population, the paper notes.

In Canada, it says hotspots for smoke included the James Bay region of Quebec and large areas of Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories.

South of the border, the paper says smoke extended over large areas of the Rocky Mountains, Midwest, Ohio Valley and northeastern United States.

In Europe, it says the smoke was especially felt in Spain, Italy and France.

Brauer says the mounting health impacts require officials to consider public health measures and messaging to protect people during smoke events.

“So what do we do about this forecast? Do we think about, there’s summer camps or a concert or a sporting event, do we make changes? Do we provide everyone with pre-existing heart and lung disease an air filter?” Brauer says.

“There’s a lot of room to sort of improve the response,” he adds.

The paper published Wednesday points to previous research examining health impacts of wildfire-related pollution in other “hotspot” regions worldwide.

It says a recent study estimated that 384,600, 144,300 and 79,300 people died annually in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin American and the Caribbean, respectively, due to chronic wildfire smoke between 2000 and 2019.

The paper concludes that “further well-designed epidemiological studies on this topic are urgently needed” to hone researchers’ understanding of the health impacts of wildfire smoke in contrast to other kinds of air pollution.

2) LSD shows promise for reducing anxiety in drugmaker’s midstage study

Courtesy Barrie360.com

By Matthew Perrone, September 6, 2025

LSD reduced symptoms of anxiety in a midstage study published Thursday, paving the way for additional testing and possible medical approval of a psychedelic drug that has been banned in the U.S. for more than a half century.

The results from drugmaker Mindmed tested several doses of LSD in patients with moderate-to-severe generalized anxiety disorder, with the benefits lasting as long as three months. The company plans to conduct follow-up studies to confirm the results and then apply for Food and Drug Administration approval.

Beginning in the 1950s, researchers published a flurry of papers exploring LSD’s therapeutic uses, though most of them don’t meet modern standards.

“I see this paper as a clear step in the direction of reviving that old research, applying our modern standards and determining what are the real costs and benefits of these compounds,” said Frederick Barrett, who directs Johns Hopkins University’s psychedelic center and was not involved in the research.

Psychedelic research is rebounding

Psychedelics are in the midst of a popular and scientific comeback, with conferences, documentaries, books and medical journals exploring their potential for conditions like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The FDA has designated psilocybin, MDMA and now LSD as potential “breakthrough” therapies based on early results.

Still, the drugs have not had a glide path to the market.

Last year, the FDA rejected MDMA — also known as ecstasy — as a treatment for PTSD, citing flawed study methods, potential research bias and other issues.

The new LSD study, published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, addresses some of those problems.

MDMA, like many other psychedelics, was tested in combination with hours of talk therapy by trained health professionals. That approach proved problematic for FDA reviewers, who said it was difficult to separate the benefits of the drug from those of therapy.

The LSD study took a simpler approach: Patients got a single dose of LSD — under professional supervision, but without therapy — and then were followed for about three months.

The paper does not detail how patients were prepared for the experience or what sort of follow-up they received, which is crucial to understanding the research, Barrett noted.

“In many cases people can have such powerful, subjective experiences that they may need to talk to a therapist to help them make sense of it,” he said.

Anxiety eased but questions remain

For the study, researchers measured anxiety symptoms in nearly 200 patients who randomly received one of four doses of LSD or a placebo. The main aim was to find the optimal dose of the drug, which can cause intense visual hallucinations and occasionally feelings of panic or paranoia.

At four weeks, patients receiving the two highest doses had significantly lower anxiety scores than those who received placebo or lower doses. After 12 weeks, 65% of patients taking the most effective LSD dose — 100 micrograms — continued to show benefits and nearly 50% were deemed to be in remission. The most common side effects included hallucinations, nausea and headaches.

Patients who got dummy pills also improved — a common phenomenon in psychedelic and psychiatric studies — but their changes were less than half the size those getting the real drug.

The research was not immune to problems seen in similar studies.

Most patients were able to correctly guess whether they’d received LSD or a dummy pill, undercutting the “blinded” approach that’s considered critical to objectively establishing the benefits of a new medicine. In addition, a significant portion of patients in both the placebo and treatment groups dropped out early, narrowing the final data set.

It also wasn’t clear how long patients might continue to benefit.

Mindmed is conducting two large, late-stage trials that will track patients over a longer period of time and, if successful, be submitted for FDA approval.

“It’s possible that some people may need retreatment,” said Dr. Maurizio Fava of Mass General Brigham Hospital, the study’s lead author and an adviser to Mindmed. “How many retreatments, we don’t know yet, but the long-lasting effect is quite significant.”

Interest from the Trump administration

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other administration officials have expressed interest in psychedelic therapy, suggesting it could receive fast-track review for veterans and others suffering psychological wounds.

Generalized anxiety disorder is among the most common mental disorders, affecting nearly 3% of U.S. adults, according to the National Institutes of Health. Current treatments include psychotherapy, antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs like benzodiazepines.

The possibility of using LSD as a medical treatment isn’t new.

In the 1950s and 1960s more than 1,000 papers were published documenting LSD’s use treating alcohol addiction, depression and other conditions. But a federal backlash was in full swing by the late 1960s, when psychedelics became linked to counterculture figures like Timothy Leary, the ex-Harvard professor who famously promoted the drugs as a means to “turn on, tune in and dropout.”

A 1970 law classifying LSD and other psychedelics as Schedule 1 drugs — without any medical use and high potential for abuse — essentially halted U.S. research.

When a handful of nonprofits begin reassessing the drugs in the 1980s and 1990s, they focused on lesser-known hallucinogens like MDMA and psilocybin, the main ingredient in magic mushrooms, to avoid the historic controversies surrounding LSD.

“LSD was right there in front of everybody, but Mindmed is the first company that actually decided to evaluate it,” Fava said.

3) Extreme weather, U.S. funding cuts add pressure for Canada’s weather service: report

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Jordan Omstead, September 11, 2025

Canada has a need for a co-ordinated flash flood warning system and could deepen its European partnerships as the United States cuts climate- and weather-related funding, says a new report digging into the future of Canada’s weather service.

The independent assessment prepared for Environment and Climate Change Canada says significant cuts to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration threaten a wide range of weather and water monitoring in Canada, from the Arctic to the Great Lakes.

“Disruptions to the flow of data between the United States and Canada, and restrictions on the sharing of satellite data in particular, could be detrimental to Canada’s ability to generate accurate and precise weather and climate analysis,” says the report published Thursday.

The report produced by the Council of Canadian Academies says maintaining Canada’s own observation network is a critical part of the weather service’s mandate, especially as climate change and artificial intelligence reshape how forecasts are built and delivered.

Yet the report notes there are gaps in that network, especially in the North, where weather stations can be hundreds of kilometres apart and miss out on key weather variables.

Less than one-third of the stations north of the 55th parallel record at least three of five key weather variables, and that percentage has been on decline over the last 30 years, the report says.

Extreme weather, fuelled by a changing climate, is leading to increased damage to stations across the country at the same time as there’s more demand for high-quality data to inform climate models. It’s also increasing the need for timely and accurate warnings, the report says.

Despite that, “program spending on hydro-meteorological services has remained relatively static over the past five years,” the report notes.

The federal government oversees a vast network of “backbone” monitoring infrastructure. As of July 2023, that included 575 weather stations, 225 co-operative climate stations, 29 lighthouse stations, 2,200 hydrometric monitoring stations, 32 operational radars and eight ground-receiving stations receiving data from satellite-born sensors.

“The backbone infrastructure is foundational, not only for the weather service; it’s foundational for climate. It’s foundational for partners in the private sector, the media,” said Jim Abraham, the past president of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society who chaired the expert panel behind the report.

The federal government asked for the CCA’s report to examine the essential functions of the public hydro-meteorological service and how it could adapt to keep pace with growing demands.

The report’s findings will support the weather service’s planning, “particularly in areas like digital innovation, user-centric service design and potential directions for enhanced public-private (domestic and international) collaboration,” a spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Canada said in a statement.

“Partly in response to the changed U.S. context, ECCC is developing measures to strengthen Canada’s data resiliency and sovereignty. These include building on Canada’s already close working relationships with other national hydro-meteorological services and with the World Meteorological Organization.”

The report does not offer formal recommendations, but it does say there’s a need for a co-ordinated flood forecast system, including flash flood warnings. Flood mapping is a collaborative effort between levels of government, while freshwater flood warnings and related mitigation are under provincial jurisdiction.

“It has been noted the distributed nature of flood warning and response initiatives is a weakness in the Canadian weather forecasting system,” the report says.

Experts who contributed to the report identified “a need for greater federal leadership in ensuring public safety from flooding through a collaborative approach.”

Recent changes at NOAA come up several times in the report.

With the U.S. administration’s recent funding cuts and restrictions on its scientists’ international collaborations, “Canada’s access to rich remote sensing data may be in jeopardy,” the report says.

It adds that while artificial intelligence promises to increase the resolution and accuracy of forecasts, it should be paired with proven modelling.

AI models’ decision-making processes are often opaque, and they can fail in unprecedented scenarios, such as those caused by climate change where past data may no longer be relevant, the report notes.

“Future forecasting systems that integrate AI and traditional physics-based modelling will help ensure accurate, reliable and more frequent predictions,” it says.