In a recent L.A. Times story, reporter Noah Haggarty writes, ” …I desperately wanted to know: Had lead once locked away in the homes of the Palisades and Altadena seeped into my bloodstream?”
The story discusses the efforts of LA Fire HEALTH Study research to understand the health impacts of exposures to smoke and ash from the January 2025 fires, including work by Dr. Kari Nadeau to examine the blood levels of lead and other toxins in first responders and residents impacted by the fires.
Amid the scattered, ad hoc testing efforts that followed, one emerged as a leader: the LA Fire HEALTH Study, or the Los Angeles Fire Human Exposure and Long-Term Health Study. Scientists from eight research institutions had banded together with some private funding to, ambitiously, study the health effects of the fires over the course of a decade.
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Dr. Kari Nadeau, a researcher with the study and professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has been collecting firefighters’ blood for years. After the L.A. County wildfires, she did the same.
The results: The firefighters who battled L.A. County’s urban fires had lead levels in their blood five times of those who had battled forest fires in Yosemite.
The reporters results were re-assuring, “Reassuring not that contamination isn’t present — it is — but that many of us are taking the simple, manageable steps to lower our risk.”
Ten days after my blood test, a letter from the Department of Public Health arrived. I quickly opened it.
The lead level in my blood: less than 1 mcg/dL.
Rysinski texted me a few days later to share that her results were the same.
In fact, of the 1,350 individuals concerned about their exposures from the wildfires who had partaken in the county’s lead blood testing program as of May 31, only seven had levels greater than 3.5 mcg/dL. All were adults older than 40; all lead levels were under 10 mcg/dL.
Dr. Nichole Quick, chief medical advisor for the Department of Public Health, wants people to remain cautious about contamination but is pleased by the initial results of the county’s lead testing program.
“The results are reassuring,” Quick told me, looking at numbers from the beginning of May.