[Stoves] report with dissapointing results from cleaner cookstoves (Crispin)

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Nikhil

>I take it you are setting for me an example of sane, measured, respectful analysis of the "stoves and health" claims and counterclaims.

I can’t set you up – you have been there for years without any intro from me.

>I tried to explain the phoniness of WHO "solid fuels use" database or "emissions database".

There are serious problems with this matter going back to before the IWA meeting. There were foundational errors that I think the students involved, at the time, did not realise were errors. They had been led down the garden path a bit by earlier, widely repeated and improper claims that ‘fuels have emissions’, that there were ‘clean fuels and dirty fuels’, that fuels had ‘a combustion efficiency’ and that the GBD meant something about an individual’s health risk.

This last error is what drives the whole nonsense about declaring an individual stove user’s life expectancy to be lengthened a little by switching to a cleaner stove, or even longer by switching to LPG. That is a linearity in that claim: less smoke guarantees a longer life. That is the essence of the claim.

Maybe it is true. It is not provable for every individual. Maybe it doesn’t have to be.  What is provably false is the claim that a GBD ‘number’ can be turned into a codified risk reduction and life extension for a particular intervention. There is a mania sweeping the funding community hoping to “monetize DALY’s”.  That would require calculating the averted DALY’s and assessing a value on each averted disability adjusted life year.

Monetizing DALY’s requires firmly tying smoke exposure to specific diseases or sets of diseases. These had been assume before. Trying to nail it down to specifics requires large scale medical observations. That is, as you pointed out earlier, quite different from guessing that smoke aggravates asthma or turns a cold into pneumonia.

>(I did review their Reviews, and started writing, but sometimes couldn't stop laughing, and sometimes got too irritated to continue.) I also tried to explain the phoniness of EPA's PM2.5 approach - the assumption of equitoxicity in particular. I then laid out the case against use of IER to invent "relative risk" estimates.

The problems/dysfunctions of IER’s are well documented, perhaps not well known. There is a lot of guessing buried inside. In the back corridors both IER’s and DALY’s are laughed at, meaning, not believed to be ‘real’. That doesn’t mean people won’t take them seriously, but I don’t think there is much belief they represent something real.

>And abuse of all such fiction, passing the pseudo-science off as an advance.

Well, there is the question: do those doing the ‘passing off’ believe they are real or not? If it can be dressed up a bit, will money flow?

>But that - in the eyes of Ron  - is sacrilege. Rant. Animosity.

He made his opinion very clear. He did not however present any evidence or opinion that there is something real, valid, substantial, factual, supporting the idea that there is a clear link between stove smoke and specific diseases or the shortening of lives by calculable amounts.

>Ron has enjoyed the luxuries of stove science while some 400 million poor people have died prematurely in the last 30 years.

They did, according to the standard definition (apparently now popular) that all people should have lived to be 86 and that anyone who dies before that dies ‘prematurely’. Causes for that prematurity have been assigned, and PM2.5 is one of the ‘causes’ assigned its due proportion.

>The poor must not have any great expectations.

If they look over the list of how they are supposedly dying, I think their reaction will be great expectorations.

>I am happy to be a heretic. How can you not be one?

Sorry, there is nothing heretical about your position. Scientific assessments and methods are canonical. The heretics are those who eschew them. The modeling of exposure in kitchens (which is available on line – you can download the WHO committee notes) is downright humorous. I say that because when I describe it to experts they all laugh.

Regards
Crispin

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