A $1.5 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency is funding a study at the University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health that will evaluate cancer risks among wildland firefighters with the goal of finding ways to reduce those risks.
Wildland firefighters constitute a large and diverse group of essential workers that has increasingly been called upon to battle larger wildfires and forest fires across a longer fire season. Cancer is a leading cause of fire service morbidity and mortality in municipal firefighters, but it has not been possible to conduct an adequately sized epidemiologic study to directly measure cancer rates in wildland firefighters.
“With wildfires increasing and more firefighters battling larger forest fires due to climate change, we need to understand the exposure science and health effects so we can reduce risk as much as possible and keep our firefighters healthy,” said study lead Jeff Burgess, MD, MPH, MS, a professor of public health and member of the BIO5 Institute and the University of Arizona Cancer Center.