Our deliberately initiated health diseases from planned burn smoke do not magically improve on the days forestry decide not to burn!
The lifetime of PM 2.5 particle pollution is from days to weeks and their travel distance ranges from 100 to greater than 1000 kilometres (NRDC, 2000)
Could you live like I am forced to? When you read about the harmful effects of smoke you more than likely will at sometime in your life if you live in Tasmania:
Maximum daily/hourly doses of Symbicort, Singulair, Intal Forte, Foradile, Alvesco, Atrovent, Ventolin, Prednisolone, Clexane, Warfarin, Panadine Forte, Endone, Oxygen.
Hospitalised with Chronic Airflow limitation - in other words can’t breathe. Painful procedure to take arterial blood to monitor blood gasses. Insert cannula into other arm for 'normal' bloods. x-Ray, Pain in chest, distress.
Sat in chair unable to breathe locked away in “home detention” for weeks breathing smoke trying to recuperate. Health Department says to stay indoors but according to a builder friend it is all but impossible to air tight a home, and I know this from my engineering background, so I was still inhaling smoke that had reached unity indoors, ie, unity = 1:1, or as bad indoors as outdoors.
Asthma exacerbation continued. Hospitalised second time. Cannula. Ultrasound, clots in leg and DVT. Nuclear scans, clots travelled to lungs (PE's). Introduced injections and blood thinning pills, pain relief.
Hospitalised again 3rd time for pain relief of clots in the leg. Put on max panadine forte and Endone. Leg is all swollen, can barely walk even when on max meds because of pain.
Awake at night, every night for months now. Usually only get 2 hours sleep because of pain and medication side effects.
Respiratory specialist attendance.
Follow up nuclear scans and X-Ray requiring cannula
4th admittance to Accident and Emergency, sudden onset short of breath, lung pain, X-Ray, cannula, bloods.
Cardiac specialist for echo cardiogram to see if clots have damaged my heart.
Further respiratory specialist visits, various GP visits, pathology visits for blood, vascular specialist visit to sort out leg pain/clots, and so on scheduled for down the track. This is coming out of your health budget!
No one in this State, it would seem, is responsible for this smoke pollution and for deliberately damaging our health. (See the Correspondence Page and read the information available on the Links page).
And in particular I would like them to read the following:
2008 - Particle Pollution Linked to Deep Vein Thrombosis and Blood Clots
22/4/2010 - Further harm
I have been on blood thinners since the smoke from the 2008 plannedburn season when I suffered severe asthma, clots, below the knee DVT, and PE’s in both lungs.
Since then I have had trouble regulating my blood thinners whilst the elevated smoke levels go up and down, and as a result of the smoke I am also forced at times to take corticosteroids, antibiotics, and pain killers concurrently.
It is known that having to take these drugs together can result in heightened blood thinning. It is also known that fine particle pollution (smoke) causes blood thickening, but these highs and lows do not counteract each other.
I believe we have been exposed to criminal levels of particulate pollution from the failed Forest Practices Authority's Co-ordinated Smoke Management Strategy (CSMS) trials that aim to put as much smoke as they can into the atmosphere for people to breathe, and my photos clearly show the outcome.
Had these bleeds occurred in my eye, brain or gut, which was a real possibility, then the outcome would have been catastrophic. This could still happen.
I woke from three hours sleep with blood coming freely out of the tissue in my lips, tongue, inside my cheeks, and inside my throat.
The close-up picture below of my wiped mouth clearly shows the process
From this....
....to this
Deliberate pain