Patricio Gonzalez, 12, and his family.

By Somini Sengupta, photographs by Chang W. Lee, graphics by Nadja Popovich • November 26, 2020

FRESNO, Calif. — The fires sweeping across millions of acres in California aren’t just incinerating trees and houses. They’re also filling the lungs of California’s children with smoke, with potentially grave effects over the course of their lives.

The effects are not evenly felt. While California as a whole has seen a steady uptick in smoke days in recent years, counties in the state’s Central Valley, which is already cursed with some of the most polluted air, were particularly hard hit by wildfire smoke this year.

So for a child, it matters where you live. It matters how much foul air you breathe in on days when there are no fires at all. It matters whether your family can afford an air purifier at home or whether they can whisk you away when ash rains down from the sky.

Dr. Kari Nadeau, a professor of medicine at Stanford who specializes in pediatric allergies and asthma, said she worried that the damage to children might last a very long time. It is well-established that long-term exposure to fine particulate matter pollution, the kind that comes out of the tail pipes of cars and trucks, increases the risk of asthma in children and compromises their immune systems.

Her latest research suggests that exposure to wildfire smoke, which contains the same particulate pollution and more, is associated with genetic changes in children’s immune cells. “It could,” she said, “have irreversible consequences.”

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