Here’s something I learned while working on the latest issue of the Digest: Every year 2 million people in developing countries die from Indoor Air Pollution [IAP]. Of those 2 million deaths, 54 percent are from COPD.
Imagine that. These people, who cook their food using biomass fuels—wood, charcoal, crop residues, animal dung, coal—are using primitive and inefficient stoves, which results in IAP, or fumes, smoke and contaminants created from the indoor cook stoves.
According to a 2009 study from the World Health Organization and the United Nations Development Programme, 3 billion people—or almost half of humanity—rely on traditional biomass as the available modern energy services fail to meet their needs.
So what can be done to combat this massive problem that affects 600-800 million households worldwide?
Photo by Envirofit International
Simon Bishop, head of Policy and Communications at the Shell Foundation, says the most effective solution is Improved Cook Stoves [ICS].
The Shell Foundation, the corporate foundation of the energy company and Envirofit International, a US non-profit, began a partnership in 2007 designed to create a global ICS business distributing millions of ICS to developing countries in an effort to reduce IAP. Their goal is to see 10 million stoves sold in 5 countries over the next 5 years.
So far, Envirofit have sold more than 100,000 ICS in southern India.
Simon says it’s hard to predict if ICS will lead to a reduction in health impacts, including COPD.
“If you’ve got indoor air pollution, and you put an improved cook stove in a home, it will reduce pollution by anything between 40 and 90 percent. But is that enough to reduce COPD cases by 40-90 percent as well? At this stage there is not enough medical evidence to prove this link. We urgently need to plug this gap in medical research.”
It will take time to prove the impact of putting an ICS in someone’s home and the incidence it has on COPD, but for now, I think it’s a pretty great start, don’t you?
How many of those people smoke? I’d wager most do, and that simply can’t be ignored because it IS a known cause of COPD.
I don’t doubt indoor pollution is a factor, probably a major one, but let’s not ignore the obvious.
Ron Graves,
Stage 4 COPD – never smoked.
These deaths are of women and children. 1.6 million annually. Women and children don’t smoke in these countries.
I agree with Dave. The World Health Organization and other US agencies believe that most of the COPD caused in developing countries isn’t due to smoking but biomass fuels from cooking inside their homes. In developed countries it seems to be smoking along with pollution in the air outside, work places, homes, etc. So really, there’s a big mix of causes for COPD worldwide which brings to the current belief that genetics have to be involved in the developing COPD, and that these environmental factors can sometimes be triggers.
Such an imprsesive answer! You’ve beaten us all with that!