Study Background:Reducing exposure to indoor air pollution is a critical initiative. Globally, about 3 billion people cook with biomass fuels, which lead to approximately 1.6 million excess deaths a year and a substantial share of the global burden of disease. These problems arise when households burn solid fuels using inefficient combustion technologies.
In Ghana, over 97% of rural households cook with biomass. Recent World Bank research suggests that use of inefficient biomass fuels is a major contributor to respiratory disease in children and adult women. This health burden is borne disproportionately by women and especially by children, for whom risk of death in the first five years due to Acute Lower Respiratory Illness (ALRI) has been convincingly linked to indoor smoke exposures. Meeting domestic energy and health needs in a manner that addresses these problems is a major challenge for sustainable development in developing countries. To address this challenge, scientific data that quantify the magnitude of the current health burden duel to inefficient burning of biomass fuel is required to plan optimal solutions.
A collaborative effort between the Kintampo Health Research Center (KHRC) and the Biomass Working Group (BWG) at Columbia University seeks to carry out pilot research related to this important and understudied topic. We hope that this work will pave the way to a prospective intervention that will aim at reducing the burden or respiratory diseases in the study population. Results of the ultimate interventional study will be important in the control of respiratory diseases in Ghana and sub-Saharan Africa as a whole if found to be beneficial.
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