17 March 2016
Cooking smoke: The silent killer!
Talking about the most dangerous “killer” in developing countries, they usually think of diseases, poverty, hunger, and climate change. No one thinks of traditional cookstoves.
Cooking smoke causes more than 4 millions of deaths each year, most of which are women and children, under statistics of WHO. The main reason is household air pollution. Its mortality rate is higher than those of malaria, tuberculosis or AIDS. Many diseases such as pulmonary tuberculosis, angiocardiopathy, cancers, cataract… and also burn threats are caused by household air pollution. India, Laos, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are Asian countries with the most deaths for household air pollution, up to 500,000 deaths each year.
Dirty cookstoves also adversely impact environment. For low combustion efficiency, such cookstoves take a lot of time and fuels. Gathering of wood for cooking has resulted in forest devastation. Gas and black carbon from flames create 25% of greenhouse waste air, much more than that from transport. In Vietnam, as estimated by the World Bank, in 2008, the use of solid fuels emitted over 44% of CO2.
Traditional cookstoves represent one of five leading health threats in developing and poor countries.