Smoke from Cooking Kills Four Million People a Year Gwynn Guilford - Quartz
go to original April 2, 2014

The smoke that kills nearly 11,000 people a day. (Reuters/Navesh Chitrakar)

Nasty airborne particles kill 7 million people a year prematurely, reports the World Health Organization - way more than previous estimates.

That news may not come as a surprise to anyone who has seen images of smog-belching smokestacks in Beijing, Delhi or Mexico. But those factories - or even the clogged roadways of modern cities - are not the biggest culprit. Each year, some 4.3 million people die earlier than they should because of foul air inside their homes, says the WHO. (Its study accounted for fact that people spend time both indoor and outdoors.)


What’s causing the air inside people’s homes to be so poisonous it kills around 11,000 people a day?  Stoves. “Having an open fire in your kitchen is like burning 400 cigarettes an hour,” says Kirk Smith, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, whose research suggests that household air pollution from cooking killed between 3.5 million and 4 million people (pdf, p.186) prematurely in 2010.

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