WHO Estimates That 4 Million People a Year Die from Indoor Cooking Smoke Katherine Martinko - treehugger
go to original May 21, 2014

Mayan cooking fire (K Martinko)

Air pollution is a big problem, from the spewing smokestacks and grey-brown skies of cities like Beijing and Delhi to the hormone-disrupting phthalates that off-gas from furniture and carpets inside new homes. But there is another type of air pollution that kills four million people a year, according to the World Health Organization, and that is the pollution caused by cooking indoors over open fires.

The WHO estimates that 7 million people die prematurely each year due to inhaling unhealthy airborne particles, which makes indoor cooking fires the biggest culprit for these deaths. It’s hard for many North Americans to imagine cooking over an open fire, since that’s not typically done here anymore, but it continues to be a part of daily life in many developing countries where dung, coal, wood, and crop waste are used as fuel instead of gas.

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