The respiratory health of rural Indian women: does the domestic cooking fuel really matter?

It is noteworthy that the air pollution in big cities creates headlines, but in many rural areas of the developing countries, the indoor air pollution is an even more serious health problem. The provision of air that is safe to breathe is just as important as safe water or food. Yet many millions of people, predominantly women, in the poor and developing countries, are obliged to breathe air that is heavily polluted with biomass emission products, which is a well-recognized source of acute as well as chronic morbidities that primarily affect the lungs [1, 2]. Poverty condemns half of the humanity to cook with solid fuels on inefficient stoves. As a cause of the ill health in the world, indoor air pollution ranks behind only malnutrition, AIDS, tobacco, and poor water or sanitation. The smoke in homes from these cooking stoves is the fourth greatest risk factor for death and disease in the world’s poorest countries, and has been linked to 1.6 million deaths per year [3]. Yet the international community has largely neglected it. This report calls for global action to fight the killer in the kitchen – the smoke from the cooking stoves.