A story in the LA Times on March 27, 2025, featured the work of the LA Fire HEALTH Study to investigate the health impacts of the LA fires on first responders.

“What you need to worry about is some of these metals that, when they get burned, they get up in the air,” said Dr. Kari Nadeau, chair of the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and one of the researchers working on the project. “They can get into your lungs, and they can get into your skin, and they can get absorbed and get into your blood.”

The study is still in its early stages, and more details on these findings will be released in the coming months.

Typically, the results of studies like these are not made public until they have been peer-reviewed and published by a scientific journal. Nadeau said the consortium decided to share some of the preliminary data early, hoping to help residents, civic leaders and first responders understand the impacts of the fires.

Dr. Nadeau was later interviewed by the New York Times regarding the findings, and stressed that these data come from only 20 firefighters and have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed paper.

Read the full LA Times article on Yahoo! News.

Watch Dr. Nadeau discuss the findings on CNN on March 30, 2025.