[Stoves] FW: health impact?

Thu Sep 4 12:13:09 CDT 2014

It's surprising to me that there is no calculation of overall stove safety
in these studies of health benefits.  Reducing emissions is important, but
preventing burns and fires is also critically important to stove use and
performance.  

I wonder if there is a way to adjust our metrics to account for some of the
'basics': building stoves with safety features; preventing skirt fires;
preventing scalding and severe burns to arms and legs and fingers and toes
(and faces).  Disfigurement may be fatal in some areas, but even when it's
not it's bound to have non-trivial life-long  impacts. 

Erin Rasmussen

erin at trmiles.com 

From: Stoves [mailto:stoves-bounces at lists.bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of
Sumi Mehta
Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2014 8:15 AM
To: stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org
Cc: Radha Muthiah; Ajay Pillarisetti; Ranyee Chiang; Kirk R. Smith
Subject: [Stoves] FW: health impact?

Thanks, Marc-Antoine,  for your keen interest in ensuring the health
benefits of adopting clean cooking technologies.  As you can imagine, this
is of very high priority here at the Alliance.  Our aim is to ensure the
promotion of cleaner cooking technologies, i.e. the cleanest possible
technologies accessible and available for different customer segments.  In
addition, since the long term goal is universal adoption of truly ‘clean’
cooking, we are committed and working with partners to ensure that the
cleanest possible technologies are developed for all fuels currently in use.

We are also committed to ensuring that people can shift to cleaner and
cleaner technologies and fuels, by working with a wide range of our partners
to facilitate increased access and affordability.  

As you are aware, there is even a wide variability of performance associated
with the range of rocket stoves available.  Indeed, HAPIT offers different
performance  scenarios to reflect the range of options in the market (as
well as aspirational performance), and the Alliance’s work will strive to
cover the range of options available.  In any case, I will leave it to Kirk
and his team to reply about the HAPIT-specific questions in more detail....

Regards,

Sumi

Sumi Mehta, MPH, PhD
Director of Research and Evaluation
1750 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Suite 300
Washington DC 20006
tel: +1 202-787-5642 
 <mailto:smehta at cleancookstoves.org> smehta at cleancookstoves.org
 <http://www.cleancookstoves.org/> www.cleancookstoves.org

From: Marc-Antoine Pare <marcpare0 at gmail.com>

Date: September 3, 2014, 2:57:50 AM EDT

To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves < stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org
<mailto:stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org> >

Subject: [Stoves] health impact?

Reply-To: Discussion of biomass cooking stoves <
stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org <mailto:stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org> >

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/L2V4b
GlicmlzL2R0bC9kM18xL2FwYWNoZV9tZWRpYS8yNDYyOTQ=.pdf
<http://digitool.library.colostate.edu/exlibris/dtl/d3_1/apache_media/L2V4bG
licmlzL2R0bC9kM18xL2FwYWNoZV9tZWRpYS8yNDYyOTQ=.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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