[Stoves] report with disappointing results from cleaner cookstoves

[Frank Shields]

<snip>

> Again I ask: if you would design a health study to really understand the health impact of improved cookstoves, what would be your methodology?
> 
Great question.

You want to compare 1) non-improved cook stoves to 2) improved cook stoves - regarding frequency of health issues.

The study you suggest is a ‘real World’ field study. We must first define ‘improved and non-improved cook stoves under real World condition. Using real fuel in real cooking situations. The term ‘improved’ does not mean new(?) stoves because a new stove will produce a lot of smoke if the biomass burned is not suitable to that stove. I think you really mean clean burning stoves compared to non-clean burning stoves. Stoves designed to burn the fuel available on site, old or new, can burn clean. 

So we first need to know what biomass is available on site and the characteristics of it pertaining to combustion. Then the limits of those characteristics on stoves chosen to be selected to be the ‘improved’ stove. 

If cooking create smoke and we want to compare ’stoves’ we need to reduce that contaminant to below ’noise’ values. So cook a lot of rice and less heating hot oils. Other more Worldly people will know better. 

OR
It would be easier to re-write your suggested study to compare smoky conditions to non-smoky conditions and we just monitor the PM2.5 on a daily basis. Then group houses into clean and dirty and see if more are sick in the dirty air houses than the clean air houses. Then the stoves used in the non-dirty houses we can call ‘improved’ cookstoves - be it new or old. 

Something like that….

Frank


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