[Stoves] Cooking with 'dirty' fuels affects women's mental health - The Conversation

[tmiles at trmiles.com]

"Cooking with 'dirty' fuels affects women's mental health" -
https://theconversation.com/cooking-with-dirty-fuels-affects-womens-mental-h
ealth-185146

 

". . . However, there's been little research into the effect that a lack of
access to clean energy for cooking has on mental health in low- and
middle-income countries.

To address that knowledge gap,
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666560322000433#!> we
surveyed more than 1,100 women who were their households' main cook and
lived in urbanising communities in Kenya, Cameroon and Ghana.

We surmised that women's mental health may be more likely to suffer from
using biomass fuels than men's as they are traditionally in charge of
preparing and cooking food in these countries.

The study revealed that women cooking primarily with charcoal and wood had
approximately 50% higher odds of likely depression than those cooking with
gas. We also found that women who had sustained two or more cooking-related
burns during the previous year had approximately 150% higher chances of
possible depression as those not burned.

Women whose homes did not have electricity for lighting also had 40% higher
odds of being depressed than those with electric lighting. Finally, we found
that a longer time spent cooking each week was associated with lower mental
well-being.

These findings suggest that enabling households to cook and light their
homes with modern fuels may have a positive impact on their mental health."

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/stoves_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20220917/a9affd88/attachment.html>