Smoke from Burning Wood Causes Health Problems

A team of experts in the United States has recently determined that people who are exposed to smoke generated by either open fires, or dirty cooking stoves, are at an increased risk of experiencing deteriorating health as a result.

The findings are made all the more severe by the fact that an estimated 3 billion people (43 percent of everyone living on the planet) rely on cooking stoves as their primary way of obtaining processed food.

In addition, the same people also rely on fires to keep themselves warm at night, or during the cold season. Therefore, they are at an increased risk of suffering ill health effects as a result of their exposure to smoke. Among them, women and children are especially vulnerable.

In the first of two studies the team conducted, it was determined that installing smoke-reducing chimneys on individual cooking stoves reduced the incidence of severe pneumonia by more than 33 percent in children.

The other research revealed that prenatal maternal exposure to woodsmoke can be correlated to decreased IQ for their children, once they come of school age. Details of the second research paper were published in the September 24 online issue of the journal NeuroToxicology.

The paper on pneumonia was released two days ahead of World Pneumonia Day, in the November 10 issue of the esteemed medical journal The Lancet.

The first “study is critically important because it provides compelling evidence that reducing household woodsmoke exposure is a public health intervention that is likely on a par with vaccinations and nutrition supplements for reducing severe pneumonia, and is worth investing in,” Kirk Smith explains.

The expert holds an appointment as a professor of global environmental health at the University of California in Berkeley (UCB) School of Public Health. He is also the principal investigator of the Randomized Exposure Study of Pollution Indoors and Respiratory Effects study (RESPIRE).

While discovering the link between lung problems and smoke exposure was not unexpected for experts, finding out that such exposure is associated with a drop in IQ in children certainly was.

“I was surprised because woodsmoke was always considered a risk for respiratory health, but not IQ. The implications of our findings are highly worrisome,” explains UCB Global Health and Environment graduate program master's student, Linda Dix-Cooper,

“Neurodevelopmental impacts have societal costs, such as impacts on an individual’s future lifetime earnings and educational attainment,” adds the expert, who was also the lead author of the NeuroToxicology paper.