Fired up for work: Examining the relationship between environmentally-vulnerable work and population health outcomes in the context of wildfire smoke exposures

Abstract Despite significant attention towards spatial health disparities and the mechanisms underlying them, less is known about how wildfire smoke may be associated with these disparities and how it may interact with other place-based characteristics, such as occupational compositions. Counties with higher rates of precarious and outdoor jobs may be uniquely vulnerable to wildfire smoke. In this study, we investigate the association between wildfire smoke exposure, the level of employment in environmentally-vulnerable jobs, and cause-specific mortality by combining multiple sources of publicly available demographic, environmental, and contextual data. We find high shares of employment and moderate levels of wildfire smoke to be associated with increased rates of chronic respiratory disease related mortality. However, contrary to our hypothesis, we do not find the effects of wildfire smoke exposure to be higher in counties with larger shares of environmentally-vulnerable jobs.