[Stoves] Burning homes, children, and spewing smokes from stoves (Was Biochar Proposal - Lloyd Helferty)

Sat Oct 29 14:10:45 CDT 2016

Dear Nikhil and AD

There was earlier mention of bespoke science requests searching for confirmation of assumptions, in that case the connection of fuel collection and sexual assault. It comes to mine reading

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-10-cookstoves-reduction-child.html

that this might have been exactly that. This was a really large survey. It is slightly odd (to me) that the stated intent was to see if dramatically improved stoves reduced the incidence of childhood pneumonia in under-5’s. What an odd scope. Why wasn’t the goal to examine the health of the community and ‘see what happens’ after the intervention?

The claim has long been held that stove smoke causes COPD and URT infections and death in small children who ‘hang around their mothers when they cook’. It seems to me this study has the surprising conclusion that there is either nearly no effect on respiratory disease, or that a >90% reduction in exposure from cooking cannot produce a detectable effect.

“The two year study was the largest of its kind anywhere in the world, with more than 10,000 children enrolled across randomised villages in Chikhwawa and Chilumba in Malawi. Half of the families involved were given two cleaner burning cookstoves<http://medicalxpress.com/tags/cookstoves/> to see if the new stoves, which can reduce emissions by up to 90%, would stop the children getting pneumonia, a major cause of death in this group. The study found that while the cookstoves were well liked, required less fuel and were quicker to cook over, there was no effect on the risk of pneumonia.”

I can’t say I am surprised by this result because there are lots of reasons why children in poor families get pneumonia.

If the goal was to identify ‘health hooks’ upon which to hang stove project finance requests, they got one: burns. Children get burned a lot be fires, particularly between the age of 2 and 3 when they are ‘toddlers’ who ‘toddle’ into the fire. Open fires are very risky to children.

In Indonesia the rural women have a very high standard of burn-safety in terms of stove design – far higher than in Africa (in my experience). Even ‘very warm’ surfaces are considered ‘too hot’ and a burn risk for children.

As you say, context is everything. Context is cultural and what is ‘acceptable’ will vary widely, whether we like it or not. Today I was installing a stove in a village school outside Dushanbe, Tajikistan to see if an 8 inch diameter TLUD can burn for the entire day (two shifts of students) without being touched by the teacher.  The first reaction was that it puts out far more heat than the stove it replaced. The Principal said that the stove they had only ‘took the edge off the cold’, not that it actually heated the room. Students wear coats the entire time they are in school. Perhaps that will change. They have been burning 12 kg a day for that small amount of comfort. Maybe we can do better with an advanced combustor.

The stove, a 650mm tall TLUD, is really hot on the outside. I will ask if they think it needs to be surrounded by a fence of some kind in order to stop children touching it ‘to see how hot it is’. It is well over 400C on the surface. Wonderful for heat, but we have to consider ‘the terms’ on which this ‘new benefit’ will be delivered. It should not include additional risks. Do school age children understand the risks of a hot stove? Do designers?

Thanks for the thoughtful analysis and Lloyd for the link.
Crispin

Moderator: I changed the subject line. The post on Dr Mortimer's work was as revealing as that earlier piece by a researcher at LBNL on stove testing.
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Wonderful. The Bollywood hero Big B - a spine TB survivor - opened this conference by video - Amitabh Bachchan opens the International Conference on Lung Health<http://www.biospectrumindia.com/biospecindia/news/224467/amitabh-bachchan-international-conference-lung-health> (Big Spectrum 27 October 2016). Maybe he will inaugurate Tier 4.7561 cookstove too.

Seriously, this study makes me question the usefulness of the term "clean cookstoves" and the abuse of the concept of "risk factors" for "premature mortality".

1. The press release says, "The study found that while the cookstoves were well liked, required less fuel and were quicker to cook over, there was no effect on the risk of pneumonia."

** Should we be thinking of different attributes, desired by the user, than unit fuel consumption or so-called "energy efficiency", and "clean" (howsoever that is measured)? If the user wishes for something that is "quicker to cook over", and "clean" does not necessarily imply reduction in the incidence of a major disease - here, under-5 pneumonia - what is that stove designers pursue?

Put bluntly, do we ignore burn and fire risks in order to save trees? "Burn the village in order to save it"??

"Dr Mortimer will demonstrate the very real dangers of cooking with an open fire as miniaturised replica housing will be set alight."

Do we need a respiratory consultant to show us the light? By fire?

Why not junk the term "improved stove" or "efficient stove" or "advanced biomass stove" and think of something that the user wants and increases usability? Or, to repeat my mantra of "contextual design and promotion"?

After all, "safe", "convenient", "usable" are context-specific terms.

Are we in the business of saving children from burns or ... (I better keep mum like a child should). **

2. Dr Mortimer is quoted, "Household air pollution kills more than 4 million people worldwide including half a million children who die from pneumonia."

** This is as misleading as the nonsense in WHO's Burning Opportunity about household cooking being a global health emergency. Doctors should know better. Attribution is not causality. HAP DOES NOT KILL DIRECTLY. All one can say is that for cohorts already dead, household air pollution is implicated as one of the risk factors in allocating premature mortality due to specific diseases. The exact numbers are cooked up, ranging from fine pies to burnt bread. Death statistics are imprecise. Allocation of each death to a single cause, and then allocating that cause to different risk factors, is statistical jiggerypokery plain and simple. Read my posts on EPA and Burnett et al. (2014) and the reference I posted earlier today to Naeher et al. 2007. Take science seriously, please.

Abuse of science abounds. See American Academy of Pediatrics Links Global Warming to the Health of Children<https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/pages/Global-Warming-Childrens-Health.aspx?nfstatus=401&nftoken=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&nfstatusdescription=ERROR%3a+No+local+token> (26 October 2015) and Global Climate Change and Children’s Health<http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/136/5/992> (AAP, November 2015) plus the references cited therein - Zhang et al. 2007 Climate Change and Disability-Adjusted Life Years<http://search.proquest.com/openview/237ae8d4bf9a2d8938cc8f8ce39efc3a/1?pq-origsite=gscholar> or even at WHO webpage Climate change and human health - risks and responses. Summary<http://www.who.int/globalchange/summary/en/index6.html> (seems to have been last revised in 2003) and the reference there "McMichael, A.J. et al. Climate Change. In: Comparative quantification of Health Risks", which I reviewed four years ago and (proud to say) trashed.

The pathology of cite-o-logy passes as "science" these days. With all due respect to all these proud researchers, I ask that they - and anybody else who is interested - only go to read IPCC Working Group II report on health and even IHME report on Global Burden of Disease from 2010 on. Serious climate science or public health science has gone away from identifying "climate change" - leave alone "anthropogenic climate change" - as a measurable "risk factor", leave alone "cause" of mortality among children. (Dr Karve's earlier post today is instructive.)

Science is politics. But there is political science of greater virtue - rooted in philosophy.

Beware of academic pediatricians.  **

3. "Such a package will need to address issues including the burning of rubbish—a common source of smoke exposure in our study—and tobacco smoking which is an increasing problem even in the world's poorest and most vulnerable populations".

** Precisely. Now let's have ISO IWA flamboyant fliers and fretters for a fee do some testing of rubbish combustion. Sujoy was perceptive - Kolkata slum-dwellers burning plastic. I have discussed plastics and rubbish burning with folks who do meteorological modeling and burden of disease studies. Suffice it to say EPA and WHO don't care to know anything relevant and useful. **

Nikhil

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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2016 18:39:52 -0400
From: Lloyd Helferty <lhelferty at sympatico.ca<mailto:lhelferty at sympatico.ca>>
To: Entire Group <biocharstoves-95wgs at wiggiomail.com<mailto:biocharstoves-95wgs at wiggiomail.com>>
Cc: Jay Anand <jayrash at gmail.com<mailto:jayrash at gmail.com>>, "Dr. A.K.Sherief"
        <aksherief at gmail.com<mailto:aksherief at gmail.com>>,  Divine Ntiokam <ntiokam2 at gmail.com<mailto:ntiokam2 at gmail.com>>,    Discussion
        of biomass cooking stoves <stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org<mailto:stoves at lists.bioenergylists.org>>
Subject: Re: [Stoves] [biochar-stoves] Biochar Proposal
Message-ID: <72f7d3f1-0b5d-5ee1-3f0c-d5a2be6dcc1d at sympatico.ca<mailto:72f7d3f1-0b5d-5ee1-3f0c-d5a2be6dcc1d at sympatico.ca>>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"

Thanks, Derick...

This is Jay's proposal, however I did get a positive response from the
Director for the "Center for e - Learning" at the *Kerala Agricultural
University* (India), Dr. A.K. Sherief (CC'd), so it may be possible to
do something. [?]

  Note: Dr. Sherief had been looking to collaborate with Universities
outside of India in *Tropical agriculture studies*.

P.S. Members of the [Biochar Stoves] and the [Stoves] Lists (CC'd)
might, however, be interested in the results of this new study as well:

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-10-cookstoves-reduction-child.html

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