In June last year, a series of devastating wildfires tore through the Canadian province of Quebec, sending huge plumes of acrid smoke drifting across North America. Three hundred miles away in Boston, dermatologist Shadi Kourosh noticed something strange. “We had an unusual spike in dermatology visits,” says Kourosh, who is director of community health in the dermatology department at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
Patients whose eczema flare-ups or itchy skin were normally only a problem in the winter were coming to her clinic at the height of summer. Like New York, Detroit, and other cities in the northern United States, Boston was experiencing
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