Critical Research Lab Closes as Lung Health Threats Multiply—Here's Why You Should Care

The United States just lost its most important tool for understanding how air pollution affects our lungs. After 30 years of groundbreaking research, the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Human Studies Facility at the University of North Carolina closed permanently on June 30, leaving scientists scrambling to study emerging respiratory threats at a critical moment.

What Made This Lab So Important?

The six-story facility housed nine specialized human exposure chambers that allowed researchers to prove direct cause-and-effect relationships between pollutants and health problems. "Without the facility, there will be no way to find out whether current air-quality standards are safe and protective," says Robert Devlin, a former senior EPA scientist who worked at the lab throughout its 30-year run.

The lab's work informed air-pollution policies not only in the United States but around the world. Its closure comes as nearly half of Americans now live with unsafe levels of air pollution, according to an April 2025 American Lung Association report.

Why Are Lung Health Threats Getting Worse?

Multiple emerging respiratory hazards are converging to create what experts call "a double whammy" for lung health. The frequency of large, destructive wildfires has more than doubled over the past two decades, with western United States and Canada seeing an 11-fold increase in extreme fires from 2003 to 2023.

The threats facing our respiratory systems include:

• Wildfire Smoke: A complex mixture of noxious gases, particulate matter, and toxic metals that varies based on fire temperature, vegetation type, and distance traveled
• Spore-Spread Fungal Diseases: Airborne pathogens that can lie dormant during dry spells then develop into dangerous molds
• Airborne Microplastics: Tiny plastic particles that can penetrate deep into lung tissue
• Combined Heat Stress: Extreme temperatures that worsen the effects of other respiratory irritants

What Do the Numbers Tell Us About Wildfire Impact?

Recent research reveals the staggering health toll of wildfire smoke. Exposure to particulate matter from Canada's 2023 wildfires alone killed an estimated 82,000 people worldwide, according to a September study led by Steven Davis, an Earth-system scientist at Stanford University.

Even more concerning, United States wildfires between 2011 and 2020 contributed to around 40,000 excess deaths from particulate-matter inhalation every year. By 2050, researchers anticipate this number will rise to 71,000 excess deaths annually.

"This is uncharted territory, and we're all trying to figure out the health effects," Davis explains. When his team calculated the economic impacts, they found that smoke exposure is "by far the single largest overall climate threat in the United States."

The closure of the Human Studies Facility isn't just about losing one lab—it represents a critical gap in our ability to understand and protect against these mounting respiratory threats. "We are losing the capabilities and infrastructure to prepare," says Ilona Jaspers, an inhalation toxicologist at UNC Chapel Hill.