The Metro: Wildfire smoke knows no borders as Michigan air quality suffers
Robyn Vincent, The Metro August 5, 2025A pulmonary expert breaks down what this means for your lungs and how to stay safe.

Smoke and glowing embers dominate a Canadian forest as wildland firefighters battle the flames.
Michigan’s skies are blanketed in haze, clouding the outlook for metro Detroiters.
It’s not fog. Wildfires burning hundreds of miles away in Canada are sending plumes of smoke all over the American Midwest, and that smoke makes breathing hard and sometimes affects our health in untold ways.
Breathing wildfire smoke near the source is harmful, but there is still uncertainty about what happens as the smoke travels.
Some emerging research suggests wildfire smoke traveling long distances chemically changes and could become even more harmful.
Pulmonary specialist Dr. Erika Moseson has been closely following the issue of wildfire smoke and lung health. She hosts the podcast “Air Health, Our Health,” where she breaks down how things like wildfire smoke — and how climate change, which is intensifying those fires — affect our health.
Moseson joined The Metro’s Robyn Vincent to discuss air quality, lung health and more. Use the media player above to listen.
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Authors
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Robyn Vincent is the co-host of The Metro on WDET. She is an award-winning journalist, a lifelong listener of WDET, and a graduate of Wayne State University, where she studied journalism. Before returning home to Detroit, she was a reporter, producer, editor, and executive producer for NPR stations in the Mountain West, including her favorite Western station, KUNC. She received a national fellowship from Investigative Reporters and Editors for her investigative work that probed the unchecked power of sheriffs in Colorado. She was also the editor-in-chief of an alternative weekly newspaper in Wyoming, leading the paper to win its first national award for a series she directed tracing one reporter’s experience living and working with Syrian refugees.
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