[Stoves] Stoves Digest, Vol 93, Issue 19

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Nikhil

I was being facetious. There is no way to make such a calculation that is believable, even with two pairs of waving hands providing distractions.

“Health is not divisible.”

Perfect. A single example of this is the idea that less smoke means better health, in rural Moçambique. Protection from mosquitoes is in part from the smoke that poisons the roofing materials. I asked if replacing smoky stoves with really clean ones would increase the incidence of malaria. That was years ago. No one wanted to check. Too much institutional risk.

Regards
Crispin


Crispin:

You ask, " Now, how do we turn this current state of knowledge into a calculation of the length, in years, of the extension of some people’s lives, particular people, about whom we know next to nothing?"

Why would you want to do that?

Burden of disease of the cohorts dead will not be replicated in future cohorts.

No claim may be entertained about "the extension of some people's lives."

At most, you may advance some hypothesis for a baseline incidence profile for some diseases - ALRIs - over short periods, and measure some correlation between changes in pollution dosage and disease incidence.

Whether what you inspect shows what you expect depends on your capacity to look; what you say about it depends on your glibness.

It's time to shoot this hobby horse of "health protective" cookstoves. Health is not divisible.

Nikhil


On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 10:34 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com<mailto:crispinpigott at outlook.com>> wrote:
Thanks Norbert that was a great find.

I was not referring to the certification of stoves in the comment below, I was referring to the declaration that particles are equally toxic for regulatory purposes, then the host of regulations and guidelines which followed.

To quote Nikhil:

“There are many sources of emissions of particulates of various sizes, often co-emitted and co-emitted with gases of different kinds. All these emissions have different pathways and residence times. We don't know squat about composition and rates of emissions of household fuels, leave alone their determinants, pathways, ingestion. We don't know their toxicity by duration of exposure for different cohorts.  Nor the disease incidence profiles.”

Now, how do we turn this current state of knowledge into a calculation of the length, in years, of the extension of some people’s lives, particular people, about whom we know next to nothing?

Regards
Crispin


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