Indoor Air Pollution - The Killer in the Kitchen
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The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations De-
velopment Programme (UNDP) are marking World Rural Women's Day
on 15 October 2004 by drawing attention to indoor air pollution
- one of the major causes of death and disease in the world's
poorest countries. While the millions of deaths from well-known
communicable diseases often make headlines, indoor air pollution
remains a silent and unreported killer. Rural women and children
are the most at risk.
Thick acrid smoke rising from stoves and fires inside homes is
associated with around 1.6 million deaths per year in developing
countries - that's one life lost every 20 seconds to the killer
in the kitchen.
Nearly half of the world continues to cook with solid fuels such
as dung, wood, agricultural residues and coal. Smoke from burn-
ing these fuels gives off a poisonous cocktail of particles and
chemicals that bypass the body's defences and more than doubles
the risk of respiratory illnesses such as bronchitis and pneumo-
nia.
The indoor concentration of health-damaging pollutants from a
typical wood-fired cooking stove creates carbon monoxide and
other noxious fumes at anywhere between seven and 500 times over
the allowable limits (see table below).
Day in day out, and for hours at a time, rural women and their
children in particular are subjected to levels of smoke in their
homes that far exceed international safety standards. The World
Energy Assessment [1] estimates that the amount of smoke from
these fires is the equivalent of consuming two packs of ciga-
rettes a day - and yet, these families are faced with what
amounts to a non-choice - not cooking using these fuels, or not
eating.
Rural women and their families also pay a high economic price
for keeping the fire burning. Up to three mornings a week are
spent collecting fuel such as wood. This perpetual toil denies
poor rural women the chance to be more productive through paid
work that would raise their family's income, improve the stan-
dard of living and enhance their nutritional and health status.
And in the crisis-stricken Darfur region of Sudan, the chore has
taken on a perilous dimension following the rape, kidnap, beat-
ings and murder of women leaving refugee camps to search for
wood.
So what can be done to put an end to indoor air pollution? Find-
ing cleaner solutions is the main challenge. Gases, liquids and
electricity are the main alternatives. Although today these en-
ergy sources derive mainly from fossil fuels, this needs not be
the case in the future when renewable energies may ease the
pressure on natural ecosystems. Other steps include the recogni-
tion and action by governments, the aid community, civil society
and other key actors that indoor smoke is a huge blight on the
lives of rural women and their children.
Two years ago, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development
(WSSD) in Johannesburg the Global Partnership for Clean Indoor
Air was launched with the backing of WHO and the international
community. As such, a growing network of experts and organiza-
tions are responding to the challenge by finding innovative and
affordable solutions that deploy cleaner stoves, fuels and smoke
hoods. Their implementation will require the development of vi-
able and sustainable markets, as created through the Liquefied
Petroleum Gas (LPG) Rural Energy Challenge for LPG delivery and
consumption, a public-private partnership including UNDP, also
established at the WSSD. But this is just the beginning. WHO re-
cently published the first-ever comprehensive Atlas of Chil-
dren's Environmental Health as a means of drawing attention to
and increasing support for reducing indoor air pollution (and
other environmental health issues). We need the same attention
paid to this "killer in the kitchen" as is paid to other major
killers.
[1] The World Energy Assessment is a joint publication of UNDP,
the UN Department for Economic & Social Affairs and the World
Energy Council