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Background:

Little research has investigated the health effects of particulate exposure from bushfires (also called wildfires, biomass fires, or vegetation fires), and these exposures are likely to increase, for several reasons. We investigated associations of daily mortality and hospital admissions with bushfire-derived particulates, compared with particulates from urban sources in Sydney, Australia from 1994 through 2002.

Methods:

On days with the highest particulate matter (PM) 10 concentrations, we assumed PM 10 was due primarily to bushfires. We calculated the contribution of bushfire PM 10 on these days by subtracting the background PM 10 concentration estimated from surrounding days. We assumed PM 10 on the remaining days was from usual urban sources. We implemented a Poisson model, with a bootstrap-based methodology, to select optimum smoothed covariate functions, and we estimated the …