[Stoves] Noise pollution and premature mortality

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Thanks Nikhil for the clarification.

Both the ‘noise’ article and the many ‘stoves articles’ advance the claim that heart disease is exacerbated (and possibly caused) by stress and particulates, respectively.

So they are lumped together in the same ‘heart disease’ bin. I recall multiple times when Apartheid was blamed in print as the cause of widespread heart disease in the Black South Africa population. Later, it was discovered that the main contributor was a bacteria that is quite common, easily transmissible, and which targets the heart. It is largely a contagious not ‘occupational’ disease.

From your earlier descriptions, the GBD allocation of causes must consider this type of new information each time they meet. As that same population is exposed to wood smoke, LPG smoke, kerosene smoke, cigarette smoke and every sort of industrial PM emission from roads to factories and power stations and bread baking, it is going to be hard to tease out which portion of heart disease is actually caused by cooking stoves.

>I don't know about noisy versus quiet stoves -- except the Primus pressure stove versus Nutan or Umrao wick kerosene stoves in my childhood - but all you have to do is measure dB in some lab test, with an "adjusted" WBT protocol.

I was not aware that a Primus with a roarer head could be a cause of heart disease merely listening to and cooking on it. They are extremely low on CO emissions, barely detectable. Wick stoves produce no noise at all, but higher PM. Maybe there is a balance in there somewhere.

>>You ask "Is it true that the first assumption about solid fuels, that they are ‘dirty’, is being validated by the numbers derived from that self-same assumption?"

>It's not even that. To call solid fuels "dirty", there have to be some notion of what the emission rates are and what the consequences are, what the pathways are.

Even ‘that’ would render the number no more than logical errors. You are saying there are mere speculations. I don’t see how we can use speculations in a stove performance rating system.

>You see, appearances to the contrary, there is no "bottom up" model of emissions to morbidity. Rather, GBD is a "top down" Blame Allocation Tool (BAT).

That is becoming clear to everyone I think.

>Quite batty, you might say. There is "no there there".

If it is a logical/causal loop, there is literally no ‘there’.

>More later if you wish on the commonality between noise pollution and air pollution DALY cakes.

How stoves are perceived to fit into this mix is important because we are supposed to work on ‘the problems of the day in which we live’. One of the problems I see is that this health impact stuff is ‘just made up’ then given lipstick and a bow. There seems to be no basis for the PM performance targets in IWA 2012:11, they were just made up, and the IWA name is the bow. If the logic behind the WHO’s current ‘emission rates’ is circular starting with ‘solid fuels are dirty’ and looping around to ‘See? They can’t burn clean enough because they are dirty’ emission rates, we can’t adopt them. If we did, it is nothing more than agreeing that solid fuels can’t burn ‘cleanly’, which is demonstrably untrue.

Maybe the whole thing is just a way of promoting LPG.

Regards
Crispin

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