In 2020, a doctor in California encountered an unusual number of fungal infections in burn patients. Understand, a burn patient getting a fungal infection isn’t particularly uncommon, but it’s not an “every time” thing, either. A search for the culprit lead them to the ventilation system, where they discovered filters that had been overwhelmed with wildfire smoke. And the doctor got to wondering if the smoke could have been a vector for the burn patients’ infections.

Up in Smoke, an episode of the RadioLab podcast, tells this story and the story of a fire ecologist who has discovered that wildfire smoke contains a dizzying array of bacteria and fungi. Based on her research, it’s certainly possible that wildfire smoke could have been the vector for those infections. It can’t be proven, but there is some strong correlation in the data.

I found the whole thing fascinating, and it’s given me a couple of things to think about. The first is how it took us this long to ask the question, “What’s in smoke?” We’ve long known that smoke contains soot that interferes with breathing, and substances that in sufficient quantities can cause permanent lung damage and many different types of cancers. But nobody ever thought to ask if there’s anything alive in smoke?

Perhaps the reason nobody ever asked is that smoke comes from fire, and of course fire is hot enough to kill anything alive. So it’s silly to even think about smoke carrying microbes. Right? It’s an interesting blind spot. Nobody thought to ask the question until a fire ecologist named Leda Kobziar started her research project in 2017.

When I see something like this I think, “What other questions aren’t we asking?”

I also wonder whether this finding, dispersal by smoke, can help answer some questions in paleomicrobiology. It could enhance our understanding of plagues, and also of how microorganisms spread during Earth’s evolution.

Definitely take the 30 minutes to listen to this podcast (unfortunately, I don’t see a written transcript). Check out the references on that page, too, for the details of both women’s research.