Jaydev Jana

Women and children disproportionally bear the greatest health burden from toxic fumes emanating from open-fire traditional cooking stoves (chulhas) fueled by solid fuels (including coal and biomass fuels, such as firewood, charcoal, dung, agricultural residue and sometimes leaves and grass). Smoke released from these chulhasis said to be equivalent to 400 cigarettes every hour and causes indoor air pollution. We often gloss over the extent to which the toxic fumes are jeopardizing the health of our women and children.

Writing in Nature Substantiality, ND Rao et al. illuminate the double burden of air pollution experienced by the poorest households in India: smoke from burning solid fuels and disproportionate exposure to ambient air pollution from general household consumption, caused by affluent urban households that have higher consumption emission per capita.

In rural and suburban areas cooking is commonly done in poorly ventilated rooms. Besides, most households do not have separate kitchens, cooking stoves are used for several hours each day and generate significant amount of indoor pollution. Biomass fuels are at the low end of the energy ladder in terms of consumption efficiency and cleanliness.

Smoke from biomass consumption produces a large number health-damaging air pollutants including particulate matter, carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen monoxides, formaldehyde, benzene, 1,3 butadiene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (such as  benzo[a]pyrine), and many other toxin organic compounds. In developing countries, where large proportions of households rely on biomass fuels for cooking and space heating, concentrations of these air pollutants tend to be highest indoors. The fuels are typically burned in simple, inefficient, and mostly unvented household cookstoves, which combined with poor ventilation generates large volumes of smokes indoors, resulting in much higher exposure to air pollutants than from outdoor sources.

In such settings, daily average and peak exposures to air pollutants often far exceed safe levels recommended by World Health Organization (WHO). A comparison of typical levels of CO, particulate matters <= 10 micrometers (PM10) and <= 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) in developing country homes using biomass fuels with the US Environmental Protection Agency standards for 24 hours average concluded that indoor concentration of these pollutants in biomass-fuel-using developing country homes usually exceed the guideline levels several-fold…read more on NOPR