[Stoves] Off-topic Re: New PM2.5 health impact analysis

[Crispin Pemberton-Pigott]

Dear Anil

While I appreciate the efforts made writing the paper nariphaltan.org/sootpaper.pdf<https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnariphaltan.org%2Fsootpaper.pdf&data=02%7C01%7C%7C1855350d42e84367655b08d6152ebaf4%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636719687774285776&sdata=y0Xzrd9wYFHDKcvKXnePkE5L8K6aKK%2Bq8bC9Pn52Guw%3D&reserved=0>, given the content of recent discussions on cause, attribution and avoidability, I feel it is important not to make claims beyond the evidence.

Your reference 1 provided in support of the claim that 2 million people living in rural households are killed by “soot from cook stove and inefficient kerosene lanterns” is not supported by the WHO reference
http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/43421/9241563168_eng.pdf;sequence=1

I refer to the table, for example, on page 11.

The footnotes on the meaning of “Strong” (evidence), “Moderate I” and “Moderate II” give me the impression that some attributions are weakly supported, for example that Asthma, tuberculosis and cataracts are direct impacts of indoor air pollution (IAP).  The footnote says that Moderate II means “limited evidence”.

Limited evidence does not mean not causal relationship, but it is a bit of a stretch to turn “limited evidence” for causing those impacts, which are technically attributions of risk to causing a portion of premature deaths in a national cohort into “deaths caused by…”. I speak of course of the asthma and TB deaths, not cataract-induced deaths.

The reason I am raising this is because there are in my view too many casual statements about what are causes and effects, and what to do about them, without clear delineation.

For example, the “cure” advocated by Kirk Smith and the WHO for the “deaths” “caused” by “inefficient kerosene lanterns” is not to regulate that kerosene lanterns have low emissions, but to ban kerosene.  It is like finding that deaths by electrocution are a social menace and the solution is to “ban electricity”.

There is not a single mention in any WHO document before 2018 that the “cause” of attributed impacts from the domestic combustion of coal or wood is related not to the fuel, but to the device that is burning it. That is a pretty big oversight and indicates to me the characterisation of the cause is inadequate or incomplete.  I do not believe anyone has attributed indoor inhalation of CO2 and water vapour to cause any of these impacts. It is obvious that the WHO and other have set up their reports so as to attribute various health impacts to the fuels, not to the causes. Yes, it is true electricity causes deaths by electrocution, but the cause is things like dropping radios into the bathtub, not “electricity”.

We the authors have to get a grip on this misrepresentation and eliminated it. We should also not have undue confidence on cause-effect relationships. As Nikhil has pointed out, generalisations about premature deaths are helpful in designing public health policies. They are not useful for making claims about how a stove project is going to avoid deaths because it requires cooking up the “avoided deaths” of particular people. There is too much hocus pocus in that exercise to lend it any credence.

Your paper is on a very important topic which is the deterioration of performance of a stove with age. The solution you report was considered (without knowing about your efforts) at the China Agricultural University in 2015 as a method of simultaneously capturing both the shadow and reflection of the particles in a single photo in order to estimate the total PM and the % colour. The difference from your apparatus was the use of a mirror in place of the Soot Plate.  The camera would see the passing soot and capture the reflection from the soot, not a plate, while the mirror would provide a ‘shadow photo’ that would form ½ the composite final image. The result would be pseudo-real time evolution of the particles as the BC/OC ratio changed as well as the total estimated mass.

I would be very interested in helping to develop an inexpensive device capable of doing this.

Best regards
Crispin



Cheers.

Anil


Nimbkar Agricultural Research Institute (NARI)
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