Ventilated cookstoves associated with improvements in respiratory health-related quality of life

August 29, 2013 · 0 comments

J Public Health (Oxf). 2013 Aug 21.

Ventilated cookstoves associated with improvements in respiratory health-related quality of life in rural Bolivia.

Alexander D, Linnes JC, Bolton S, Larson T. Center for Global Health, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

dalexander1@bsd.uchicago.edu

BACKGROUND: Household air pollution (HAP) from combustion of biomass fuels worldwide is linked to asthma, respiratory infections and chronic pulmonary diseases. Implementation of ventilated cookstoves significantly reduces exposure to HAP. However, improvements in concurrent respiratory health-related quality of life (HRQoL) have not been previously evaluated with a standardized questionnaire.

METHODS: The association between woodsmoke exposure and respiratory HRQoL outcomes was evaluated using an intervention study in a rural community in Bolivia. Indoor carbon monoxide (CO) levels from traditional stoves and from cookstoves with chimneys were analyzed alongside interview results of women heads-of-households using the St. George’s Respiratory Questionnaire (SGRQ) in 2009 and 1-year post-intervention.

RESULTS: Pronounced improvements in respiratory HRQoL and significant reductions of household CO levels followed installation of ventilated cookstoves. Stove implementation yielded lower indoor CO values and correlated positively with improved SGRQ scores.

CONCLUSIONS: This is the first use of a standardized respiratory HRQoL assessment to determine the impact of ventilated cookstove implementation on reducing HAP. This preliminary study utilizes the SGRQ as a valuable tool enabling analysis of these health effects in relation to other respiratory disease states.

Household fuels, low birth weight, and neonatal death in India: The separate impacts of biomass, kerosene, and coal.

August 29, 2013 · 0 comments

Int J Hyg Environ Health. 2013 Aug;216(5)

Household fuels, low birth weight, and neonatal death in India: The separate impacts of biomass, kerosene, and coal.

Epstein MB, Bates MN, Arora NK, Balakrishnan K, Jack DW, Smith KR. School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.

We examined the impact of maternal use of different household cooking fuels in India on low birth weight (LBW<2500g), and neonatal mortality (death within 28 days of birth). Using cross-sectional data from India’s National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3), we separately analyzed the prevalence of these two outcomes in households utilizing three types of high-pollution fuels for cooking – biomass, coal, and kerosene – using low-pollution fuels (gas and biogas) as the comparison “control” group. Taking socioeconomic and child-specific factors into account, we employed logistic regression to examine the impact of fuel use on fetal and infant health.

The results indicate that household use of high-pollution fuels is significantly associated with increased odds of LBW and neonatal death. Compared to households using cleaner fuels (in which the mean birth weight is 2901g), the primary use of coal, kerosene, and biomass fuels is associated with significant decreases in mean birth weight (of -110g for coal, -107g for kerosene, and -78g for biomass). Kerosene and biomass fuel use are also associated with increased risk of LBW (p<0.05). Results suggest that increased risk of neonatal death is strongly associated with household use of coal (OR 18.54; 95% CI: 6.31-54.45), and perhaps with kerosene (OR 2.30; 95% CI: 0.95-5.55).

Biomass is associated with increased risk of neonatal death among infants born to women with no more than primary education (OR 7.56; 95% CI: 2.40-23.80). These results are consistent with a growing literature showing health impacts of household air pollution from these fuels.

Zambia – new stove could eliminate use of charcoal

August 26, 2013 · 1 comment

African Startup Converts Waste Into Clean Fuel | Source: Zoe Fox, mashable.com – Aug 20, 2013.

KITWE, Zambia — A joint Zambian and Swedish venture is looking to curb deforestation by introducing a new type of cookstove, which runs solely on clean fuel, into Zambian households.

Zambia cuts down hundreds of thousands of wooded acres every year, as one of the most aggressive sites of deforestation in the world. According to a recent report, Zambia loses between 600,000 and 750,000 acres of its 125 million acres of forest each year. 

One of the major drivers of this deforestation is household cooking on charcoal-burning stoves, used in 80% of households. While electric stoves are making headway among the country’s wealthy, unreliable electricity requires nearly every house to have a charcoal-burning backup, which is both unsafe and detrimental to the environment.

Emerging Cooking Solutions‘ bio-waste pellet-burning stove could eliminate the use of charcoal from kitchens — if it catches on.

Using disposed sawdust from pine and eucalyptus trees, Emerging Cooking Solutions manufactures pellets made from from the bustling sawmill industry in Kitwe, located in the country’s lucrative Copperbelt region.

[click to continue…]

Bookmark and Share

Indonesia – Toward universal access to clean cooking

August 26, 2013 · 0 comments

Indonesia – Toward universal access to clean cooking, 2013.

Zhang, Yabei; Tuntivate, Voravate; Aristanti, Christina; Wu, Yun. World Bank.

Rural households in Indonesia are likely to rely on biomass cooking energy for years to come. Today, approximately 40 percent of Indonesia’s households—about 24.5 million households, located mainly in rural areas—still rely on traditional biomass energy (mainly fuelwood) as their primary cooking fuel. The Indonesian government’s highly successful Kerosene-to-LPG Conversion Program (2007–12) has resulted in a fivefold increase in the number of LPG users, located mainly in urban areas. But among biomass-using rural households located far from the LPG distribution network, the program’s impact has been limited, with only a 9 percent decline in fuelwood use over a three-year period (2007–10). Rural households are unlikely to switch to modern fuels on a large scale if they are unaffordable and will likely continue to rely on biomass cooking energy for the foreseeable future.

Any strategy to scale up the use of clean biomass stoves requires an enabling environment. This stocktaking exercise recommends implementing a comprehensive strategy that institutionalizes issues of cooking technologies and biomass fuels into the national policy framework, requiring centralized leadership and cross-sector cooperation. To create a sustainable market, both supply- and demandside issues must be tackled in an integrated manner, supported by both technical assistance and financing. A results-based financing approach, which offers incentives and flexibility, is recommended to motivate private suppliers to deliver clean cooking solutions to households.

Lao PDR – Pathways to cleaner household cooking in Lao PDR : an intervention strategy

August 26, 2013 · 0 comments

Lao PDR – Pathways to cleaner household cooking in Lao PDR : an intervention strategy, 2013.

Tang, Jie; Tuntivate, Voravate; Toba, Natsuko. World Bank,

Today the vast majority of households in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) rely on solid fuels, primarily firewood and charcoal, as their main source of cooking energy. Census data show that household use of firewood and charcoal for cooking declined only 3 percent between 1995 and 2005. Over that period, a sizeable portion of households, particularly those in more economically advanced urban areas, switched within the fuelwood category, from firewood to charcoal. But as of 2005, close to 90 percent of rural households and well over half of urban ones still depended on firewood to meet most of their cooking needs.

The proposed intervention for scaling up the use of improved cookstoves in Lao PDR relies on market-based mechanisms, supported by technical assistance and capacity building for the public and private sectors. It is widely thought that a market-based approach in commercializing improved stoves is the best way to ensure efficiency of interventions and sustainability of programs.

Forest cover associated with improved child health and nutrition

August 20, 2013 · 0 comments

Forest cover associated with improved child health and nutrition: evidence from the Malawi Demographic and Health Survey and satellite data. Global Health: Science and Practice, Aug 2013.

Kiersten B Johnson, et al.

Healthy forests provide human communities with a host of important ecosystem services, including the provision of food, clean water, fuel, and natural medicines. Yet globally, about 13 million hectares of forests are lost every year, with the biggest losses in Africa and South America. As biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation due to deforestation continue at unprecedented rates, with concomitant loss of ecosystem services, impacts on human health remain poorly understood. Here, we use data from the 2010 Malawi Demographic and Health Survey, linked with satellite remote sensing data on forest cover, to explore and better understand this relationship.

Our analysis finds that forest cover is associated with improved health and nutrition outcomes among children in Malawi. Children living in areas with net forest cover loss between 2000 and 2010 were 19% less likely to have a diverse diet and 29% less likely to consume vitamin A-rich foods than children living in areas with no net change in forest cover. Conversely, children living in communities with higher percentages of forest cover were more likely to consume vitamin A-rich foods and less likely to experience diarrhea. Net gain in forest cover over the 10-year period was associated with a 34% decrease in the odds of children experiencing diarrhea (P = .002).

Given that our analysis relied on observational data and that there were potential unknown factors for which we could not account, these preliminary findings demonstrate only associations, not causal relationships, between forest cover and child health and nutrition outcomes. However, the findings raise concerns about the potential short- and long-term impacts of ongoing deforestation and ecosystem degradation on community health in Malawi, and they suggest that preventing forest loss and maintaining the ecosystem services of forests are important factors in improving human health and nutrition outcomes.

A pilot study characterizing real time exposures to particulate matter and carbon monoxide

August 20, 2013 · 0 comments

A pilot study characterizing real time exposures to particulate matter and carbon monoxide from cookstove related woodsmoke in rural Peru. Atmospheric Environment Volume 79, November 2013, Pages 380–384.

Adwoa A. Commodore, et al.

Nearly half of the world’s population is exposed to household air pollution (HAP) due to long hours spent in close proximity to unvented cooking fires. We aimed to use PM2.5 and CO measurements to characterize exposure to cookstove generated woodsmoke in real time among control (n = 10) and intervention (n = 9) households in San Marcos, Cajamarca Region, Peru. Real time personal particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter ≤2.5 μm (PM2.5), and personal and kitchen carbon monoxide (CO) samples were taken. Control households used a number of stoves including open fire and chimney stoves while intervention households used study-promoted chimney stoves. Measurements were categorized into lunch (9 am–1 pm) and dinner (3 pm–7 pm) periods, where applicable, to adjust for a wide range of sampling periods (2.8–13.1 h). During the 4-h time periods, mean personal PM2.5 exposures were correlated with personal CO exposures during lunch (r = 0.67 p = 0.024 n = 11) and dinner (r = 0.72 p = 0.0011 n = 17) in all study households. Personal PM2.5 exposures and kitchen CO concentrations were also correlated during lunch (r = 0.76 p = 0.018 n = 9) and dinner (r = 0.60 p = 0.018 n = 15). CO may be a useful indicator of PM during 4-h time scales measured in real time, particularly during high woodsmoke exposures, particularly during residential biomass cooking.

Impacts on household fuel consumption from biomass stove programs in India, Nepal, and Peru

August 20, 2013 · 0 comments

Impacts on household fuel consumption from biomass stove programs in India, Nepal, and Peru. Energy for Sustainable Development, 24 June 2013.

Michael A. Johnson, et al.

Published data from quantitative assessments of in-home fuel use in developing countries are sparse, yet this information is important for understanding the basic daily energy consumption of half the world’s population as well as the effectiveness of programs seeking to reduce the health, environmental, and socioeconomic impacts of using inefficient cooking technologies and fuels. This paper presents results from a coordinated training and field study program sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Projections Agency, with the goal of increasing our understanding of household energy use by building capacity of stove implementing organizations.

The programs were conducted with stove organizations in India, Nepal, and Peru, with results from Nepal and Peru indicating the respective stove interventions resulted in significant fuel savings (~ 27–66%), and in India the energy consumption from combined usage of a pellet stove and liquefied petroleum gas was 59% lower than use of traditional biomass stoves. The fuel savings in Peru were highly dependent on the level of stove maintenance and user training with the largest savings (66% per capita) achieved in homes where the stoves were maintained and users were provided additional training, indicating that these are critical factors for realizing maximum stove performance in homes.

Combining these results with previously published KPT results showed patterns of higher baseline fuelwood consumption in Latin America (2.1–3.4 kg per capita per day) in comparison to Nepal and India (1.0–1.4 kg per capita per day). The fuel savings estimates from the KPT studies were generally similar to savings estimates for controlled testing (Water Boiling Tests and Controlled Cooking Tests) of the respective program stoves, showing promise for better linking stove performance in the laboratory with field performance. Finally, variability of fuel consumption and fuel savings estimates are examined to inform on study design and monitoring for carbon offset methodologies.

Quantitative metrics of stove adoption using Stove Use Monitors (SUMs)

August 16, 2013 · 0 comments

Quantitative metrics of stove adoption using Stove Use Monitors (SUMs). Biomass and Bioenergy 2013.

Ilse Ruiz-Mercado, et al.

The sustained use of cookstoves that are introduced to reduce fuel use or air pollution needs to be objectively monitored to verify the sustainability of these benefits. Quantifying stove adoption requires affordable tools, scalable methods and validated metrics of usage.We quantified the longitudinal patterns of chimney-stove use of 80 households in rural Guatemala, monitored with Stove Use Monitors (SUMs) during 32 months. We counted daily meals and days in use at each monitoring period and defined metrics like the percent stove-days in use (the fraction of days in use from all stoves and days monitored).

Using robust Poisson regressions we detected small seasonal variations in stove usage, with peaks in the warm-dry season at 92% stove-days (95%CI: 87%, 97%) and 2.56 average daily meals (95%CI: 2.40, 2.74). With respect to these values, the percent stove-days in use decreased by 3% and 4% during the warm-rainy and cold-dry periods respectively, and the daily meals by 5% and 12% respectively. Cookstove age and household size at baseline did not affect usage.

Qualitative indicators of use from recall questionnaires were consistentwith SUMs measurements, indicating stable sustained use and questionnaire accuracy.These results reflect optimum conditions for cookstove adoption and for monitoring in this project, which may not occur in disseminations undertaken elsewhere. The SUMs measurements suggest that 90% stove-days is a more realistic best-case for sustained use than the 100% often assumed. Half of sample reported continued use of open-cookfires, highlighting the critical need to verify reduction of open-fire practices in stove disseminations.

 

 

 

 

Malaria Infection, Poor Nutrition and Indoor Air Pollution Mediate Socioeconomic Differences in Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes

August 16, 2013 · 0 comments

Malaria Infection, Poor Nutrition and Indoor Air Pollution Mediate Socioeconomic Differences in Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes in Cape Coast, Ghana.

Adeladza K. Amegah, et al.

Background – The epidemiological evidence linking socioeconomic deprivation with adverse pregnancy outcomes has been conflicting mainly due to poor measurement of socioeconomic status (SES). Studies have also failed to evaluate the plausible pathways through which socioeconomic disadvantage impacts on pregnancy outcomes. We investigated the importance of maternal SES as determinant of birth weight and gestational duration in an urban area and evaluated main causal pathways for the influence of SES.

Methods – A population-based cross-sectional study was conducted among 559 mothers accessing postnatal services at the four main health facilities in Cape Coast, Ghana in 2011. Information on socioeconomic characteristics of the mothers was collected in a structured questionnaire.

Results – In multivariate linear regression adjusting for maternal age, parity and gender of newborn, low SES resulted in 292 g (95% CI: 440–145) reduction in birth weight. Important SES-related determinants were neighborhood poverty (221 g; 95% CI: 355–87), low education (187 g; 95% CI: 355–20), studentship during pregnancy (291 g; 95% CI: 506–76) and low income (147 g; 95% CI: 277–17). In causal pathway analysis, malaria infection (6–20%), poor nutrition (2–51%) and indoor air pollution (10–62%) mediated substantial proportions of the observed effects of socioeconomic deprivation on birth weight. Generalized linear models adjusting for confounders indicated a 218% (RR: 3.18; 95% CI: 1.41–7.21) risk increase of LBW and 83% (RR: 1.83; 95% CI: 1.31–2.56) of PTB among low income mothers. Low and middle SES was associated with 357% (RR: 4.57; 95% CI: 1.67–12.49) and 278% (RR: 3.78; 95% CI: 1.39–10.27) increased risk of LBW respectively. Malaria infection, poor nutrition and indoor air pollution respectively mediated 10–21%, 16–44% and 31–52% of the observed effects of socioeconomic disadvantage on LBW risk.

Conclusion – We provide evidence of the effects of socioeconomic deprivation, substantially mediated by malaria infection, poor nutrition and indoor air pollution, on pregnancy outcomes in a developing country setting.

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →