Rural Indoor Cooking Poses Threat to Health

The scene is common throughout the Third World: a woman working over an indoor fire in a rural village.

Exposed to smoke for hours a day, often in a poorly ventilated dwelling, millions of rural women face health risks potentially more severe than workers in many hazardous industrial occupations, according to a researcher here.

“People have always associated air pollution with the outdoors or occupations dominated by men,” said Kirk R. Smith of the federally funded East-West Center here. “But we’re talking about the inverse: indoor, domestic women.”

Women Do the Cooking

More than half the world’s households cook using biomass, usually wood, crop residues or dried cow dung, Smith said. In nearly all traditional rural societies, he said, women do the cooking.

Wood smoke and cigarette smoke share many similarities, among them benzopyrene, an apparent carcinogen, according to Smith. During three hours of cooking over such fires, a woman may inhale enough of the chemical to equal 20 packs of cigarettes, Smith estimated.

High levels of formaldehyde, nitrogen dioxide and particulates also have been found in the smoke, which is a complex mixture of 400 or 500 different things, Smith said.

“The levels are well above U.S. standards,” Smith said. “If they existed in a workplace, it would be shut down.”

An important study conducted in Nepal and published during 1984 indicated that domestic smoke exposure was associated with roughly half the cases of obstructive lung disease in that country. Smith and others also think smoke plays a large part in respiratory infections, which, according to the World Health Organization, were the leading cause of death in developing countries during 1984.