[Stoves] health impact?

Wed Sep 3 11:28:57 CDT 2014

It may help to keep in mind that we've made some progress in reducing mortality among small children

UNICEF reported in 2012 that childhood mortality declined almost by 1/2 since 1990. 

http://data.unicef.org/child-mortality/under-five

According to the full report http://data.unicef.org/resources/2013/publication/apr

Pneumonia remains a major cause of mortality for children under 5.  As a cooking stove community, we do our best to reduce infant exposure to cooking smoke, because in the past that's been a key source of the kind of early lung damage that can cause a bacteria or a virus to develop into fatal pneumonia.   

More on pneumonia interventions:  http://worldpneumoniaday.org/learn/

But reducing air pollution is just one type of intervention that can save lives. 

Another big intervention is in preventing burns, and skirt fires. 

WHO has a good source of introductory data on burns, and burn deaths: http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/other_injury/burns/en/

from the WHO site:

"Over 95% of fatal fire-related burns occur in low- and middle-income countries. South-East Asia alone accounts for just over one-half of the total number of fire-related deaths worldwide and females in this region have the highest fire-related burn mortality rates globally. Among the various age groups, children under 5 years and older people (i.e. those aged over 70 years) have the highest fire-related burn mortality rates. In addition to those who die, millions more are left with lifelong disabilities and disfigurements, often with resulting stigma and rejection."

Preventing disfigurement and death from burns and preventing skirt fires are key health improvements that we can make by designing good stoves for cooking and heating.   We can also use an integrated approach to energy, and encourage solar and wind for lighting to reduce fires from kerosene lanterns and other sources.  (I think solar stoves are a good idea too, but you can also burn yourself with them so careful implementation and design is important.) 

  There are more resources online, but I tend to start with UNICEF and WHO because they've got good historical data going back to 1960 or so, although it takes some digging to find it.

Erin Rasmussen

erin at trmiles.com

From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of Marc-Antoine Pare
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2014 11:58 PM
To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Subject: [Stoves] health impact?

Hi everyone,

A big confession: having tinkered with stoves for years, I never actually looked into the numbers of stove health impacts. I'm trying to fix that, and I hope you can help!

I mean, yes, I can wave my hands about PM and CO and four million deaths!

But how many deaths (or DALYs) do you avert per stove? Or per 10,000 stoves? Or per 100,000,000?

I thought it would be an easy question to answer, but it's turning out to be quite tricky to even ballpark.

Here is one interesting source. This is from the very recent webinar on Kirk Smith's HAPIT tool. 

http://www.cleancookstoves.org/resources_files/hapit-results-rwanda.pdf

This report considers 25,000 households.

If you provide all of those households a rocket stove, you save only 0.75 lives per year.

If you take the GACC's target 100,000,000 households, that would mean

0.75/25000*100000000 = 3,000 lives saved worldwide annually.

What am I missing there? This seems so small.

Some speculation:

Kirk Smith mentions in the HAPIT webinar that even a small amount of PM2.5 is still harmful. Perhaps biomass stoves just don't get the number low enough?

I think this would fit with the chart in the linked PDF that shows that stoves only reduce deaths by <5% for indoor air pollution. A few times in the HAPIT webinar, they mention "a lot of lives are still left on the table."

This also seems to agree with something I found in Christian L'Orange's dissertation:

http://digitool.library.colostate.edu///exlibris/dtl/d3_1/apache_media/L2V4bGlicmlzL2R0bC9kM18xL2FwYWNoZV9tZWRpYS8yNDYyOTQ=.pdf <http://digitool.library.colostate.edu/exlibris/dtl/d3_1/apache_media/L2V4bGlicmlzL2R0bC9kM18xL2FwYWNoZV9tZWRpYS8yNDYyOTQ=.pdf> 

Figure 33 shows that Envirofit G3300 stoves only have a 3% (or so) impact on "Adjusted Relative Risk" (of death)

Please do not worry about hurting my feelings in correcting these numbers. Am I thinking about this the wrong way around? Have I punched the numbers in incorrectly? 

Also, I would be very interested to read more good papers on health impacts for stoves. It is all really quite interesting work. I feel bad that I didn't look at it sooner.

Best,

Marc Paré

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