Smoke is a silent epidemic killer in many African kitchens. In this report by Sade Oguntola, experts warn that the smoke from cooking with fuels like firewood and kerosene is turning kitchens in the world’s poorest countries into death traps.
Carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and small lung-damaging particulate matter are harmful air pollutants that pose significant short and long term health risks. Emission from electric generator, vehicle exhaust pipes, and other combustion sources, are among six primary pollutants that make air unhealthy.
Unfortunately, the process of cooking food also emits a cocktail of these potentially hazardous chemicals and compounds in many kitchens in the world. Whether it is with firewood, charcoal, wood sawdust, animal wastes like dung or kerosene, the smoke from burning these fuels has turned kitchens in the world’s poorest countries into death traps.
Around three billion people cook and heat their homes using open fires and simple stoves by burning wood, animal dung and crop waste, including coal.
Sadly, indoor air pollution caused by the smoke from the burning of these solid fuels kills over 1.6 million people, predominately women and children, each year.
Indoor air pollution is not an indiscriminate killer, but, women typically spend more hours per day by the fire, exposed to smoke, often with their young children nearby.
World Health Organisation (WHO) also attributed over fourmillion premature deaths annually from non-communicable diseases including stroke, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung cancer to household air pollution from solid fuels.
It added that more than 50 per cent of premature deaths due to pneumonia among children under five are caused by the particulate matter (soot) inhaled from household air pollution.
“In fact, its death toll is almost as great as that caused by unsafe water and sanitation. And its public health and environmental implications makes it a big deal. Moreover, Nigeria is one of 15 countries in the world that account for majority of premature deaths linked to household air pollution,” said Sola Olopade, a professor of medicine and director, International Programmes, Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago, United States.
Researchers now understand that the process of cooking food with unclean fuels, particularly firewood and kerosene, is turning kitchens in the world’s poorest countries into death traps because a cocktail of potentially hazardous chemicals and compounds are emitted.
The effects of smoke on health
“Exposure to smoke from cooking indoors is a big problem, not only in Nigeria, but all over the world. Where you cook, what you cook with has implications for your health. It has implication on the health of the family; the health of her unborn child as well as the other children in the family.
“Exposure to indoor pollution and to a large extent outside air pollution from the cars, generators, and so on is a major contributor to the development of hypertension, stroke and diabetes,” said Olopade
Sadly, many women and their children that cook with unclean fuels like firewood and kerosene experience different symptoms. They experience symptoms such as headaches, watery eyes, blurred vision, chest tightness, difficulty breathing and dry cough due to smoke.
However, Professor Olopade said, “If you do analysis of their urine, you can see it. There are breakdown products of some of these air pollutants they inhale from smoke. The breakdown products are also carcinogenic, meaning that it can cause cancer. So, it is not only pneumonia they can get, it can also predispose them to development of cancer.”
Also, due to smoke and the sitting postures many women maintain when cooking, like people that work as chimney sweepers, they also stand a higher risk of developing bladder and urinogenital cancers.
Reducing lethal levels of smoke
Cooking with clean cooking stoves and fuels like liquid petroleum gas and in well ventilated rooms would lead to a healthier life. In fact, “WHO has actually suggested that kerosene should be removed as a household energy or cooking fuel,” Professor Olapade said.
According to him: “The best cooking fuels, both for efficiency and safety, are those that do not produce lot of pollutants, including electricity, liquefied petroleum gas and ethanol.
“Kerosene is not only bad for the pregnant women in that it increases their risk of developing preeclampsia, a serious complication of high blood pressure, it increases their risk of a miscarriage and low birth weight babies.”
In the first randomised, controlled trial to examine the links between cooking-related household air pollution and blood pressure levels over the course of a pregnancy, Professor Olopade and his team found that switching to clean fuel was beneficial.
Pregnant women who switched to ethanol from traditional cooking fuels such as firewood were more than three times less likely to develop high blood pressure than those who continued to use biofuels and kerosene. Those who switched from kerosene to ethanol were more than four times less prone to elevated blood pressures.
The researchers enrolled 324 pregnant women from Ibadan, Nigeria, in their study. None of the women had high blood pressure when they entered the study. Women who smoked or lived with a smoker or who cooked for a living were excluded.
The researchers found that 1.9 per cent of the pregnant women who cooked with ethanol developed high blood pressure at the last antenatal visit, compared to 6.4 per cent of those who cooked with wood and 8.8 per cent of those who used kerosene.
In addition, there is evidence to link indoor air pollution to asthma, tuberculosis, low birth weight and infant deaths and cataracts.
How to stop this killer
Reducing the exposure to smoke will take concerted political will, international co-ordination, government action and targeted funding to ensure improved access to clean stoves and fuel. It is cost effective in preventing ongoing health problems like hypertension and asthma.
According to Professor Olopade “For instance, in our study, preventing a mean diastolic blood pressure difference of about 3.8mmHg in pregnant women by using clean fuels is substantial. It is not like given antihypertensive medicines. With improved cooking stoves and clean fuel, there is reduction in indoor air pollution related complaints.”
It is a step to ensuring healthier, brighter children in the future. More children will be born with optimum lung function, better IQs and fewer cases of diseases like asthma and pneumonia.