You may live many miles away from a wildfire, but it could still kill you. That’s because all that smoke wafting in from afar poses a mortal risk. The threat is so great, in fact, that any official tally of people killed in a fire most likely is wildly low, given that it counts obvious victims, not those who later died after inhaling its far-flung haze. Los Angeles’ catastrophic blazes in January , for instance, killed 30 people according to authorities, but more like 440 according to scientists , who determined excess deaths at the time were likely due to smoke.

As climate change makes such conflagrations ever more catastrophic, that mortality is only going to escalate. A new study in the journal Nature estimates that wildfire smoke already kills 40,000 Americans each year — the

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