Elevating the status of women reduces risk of exposure to harmful indoor air pollution – a leading cause of premature death in the developing world – according to new research.
More than a quarter of the deaths of young children every year are preventable by reducing pollution, World Health Organization (WHO) officials said on Monday. According to two new reports, 1.7 million children under 5 years old die every year from environmental risks, including “indoor and outdoor air pollution, second-hand smoke, unsafe water, lack of sanitation and inadequate hygiene.”
Cooking over an open fire or with traditional cookstoves are common practices worldwide that some experts say kill millions of people every year, through indoor air pollution, and cause massive environmental impacts from natural resource depletion to climate change. This has led to an international movement to build a better, cleaner cookstove, that some say is as much contributing to the problem as it is trying to solve it.
In India, more than 100,000 children died as a result of household air pollution that same year. Burning solid fuels such as wood and dung for cooking is a leading risk factor for lower respiratory infections. Lower respiratory infections include deaths caused by influenza, haemophilus influenzae type B, pneumonia, respiratory syncytial virus, and other respiratory infections. A detailed breakdown of deaths caused by these different viruses and bacteria can be found in the published Global Burden of Disease studies.