Description:
In India, approximately 86 per cent of rural households and 24 per cent of urban households rely on solid biomass fuels for their cooking needs. These fuels used in traditional stoves, in households often with little ventilation, emit smoke containing significant quantities of harmful pollutants in the immediate proximity of people leading to serious health consequences. It is estimated that up to 444,000 premature deaths in children under 5 years, 34,000 cases of chronic respiratory disease in women under 45 years and 800 cases of lung cancer are attributable to exposure to Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) due to use of solid fuels by households. While health risks drive policy concerns, these are often difficult and costly to estimate. Information on population exposure to IAP is a useful proxy for health risks, and hence guide and facilitate mitigation actions. Better information on patterns of exposure and its determinants would assist in designing more effective interventions and strategies. As part of World Bank's study on Household Energy, Air Pollution and Health in India, a pilot exercise was conducted in rural Andhra Pradesh to collect quantitative evidence on the levels of exposure to IAP and key factors influencing these levels. This issue of the newsletter presents the results of this study designed by the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, University of California, Berkeley (USA), and undertaken in partnership with Sri Ramachandra Medical College in Chennai and the Institute of Health Systems in Hyderabad (India)