yup you have no problem with a half million or so dying each year due to no fossil fuel right?
Do fumes from cooking smoke kill 600,000 Africans yearly? | Africa Check
Do fumes from cooking smoke kill 600,000 Africans yearly?
A policy think-tank has tweeted that indoor air pollution caused by cooking smoke kills 600,000 Africans every year. But estimating such deaths is not that exact.
Researched by Vinayak Bhardwaj
Indoor air pollution is a massive public health problem across the world. That is because
three billion people are thought to cook and heat their homes with open fires and simple stoves burning wood, animal dung, crop waste (known as biomass) and coal.
Breathing in fumes from cooking smoke kills 600,000 Africans each year, a policy think-tank called the
Africa Progress Panel tweeted recently.
Could the number of deaths be that high?
Estimating deaths due to risk factors tricky
The Africa Progress Panel’s tweet on 4 November 2016.
The Africa Progress Panel consists of
a forum of 10 prominent people, including former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and humanitarian and former first lady of Mozambique, Graça Machel. They aim to influence policy in Africa.
We asked the think-tank for the source of its claim, which is
also repeated in an article on its website. We have not yet received a reply but will update this report if we do.
In general, estimating deaths due to
risk factors such as air pollution is tricky, a professor of environmental epidemiology at the
Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute,
Martin Roosli, told Africa Check.
This is because you cannot directly observe the numbers of deaths. When people die as a result of breathing in fumes from burning solid fuels, they usually die of breathing difficulties caused by acute and chronic respiratory diseases.
Deaths due to three lung diseases, in particular, are usually linked to burning solid fuels for cooking: acute lower respiratory infections in children under five, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer in
people older than 30.
To determine the number of deaths that can be attributed to a risk factor, such as cooking smoke, researchers work out how many people are exposed to it. From previous studies, they would know what the relative risk is of dying from a disease caused by indoor air pollution.
The resulting fraction would be multiplied by the total number of deaths in a given country in a given year to get an estimate of the number of deaths due to the risk factor.
