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Reducing Wood Smoke Pollution Saves Lives

A new study  published in the British Journal of Medicine has found that reducing wood smoke pollution from wood stoves is associated with significantly reduced risk of death. The study, which was conducted in Australia, looked at a community in which wood stove prevalence fell from 66% to 30% after implementation of a series of interventions aimed at reducing wood smoke. This resulted in a 40% reduction in wintertime air pollution and in reduced all-cause, cardiovascular and respiratory mortality during the period of improved air quality.

The researchers note that their findings “highlight the potential for important public health gains from interventions to reduce ambient pollution from biomass smoke”.

Scientists have long known that air pollution contributes to human sickness and death. A study by Cornell professor David Pimentel estimates that air pollution from smoke and various chemicals kills 3 million people a year worldwide, and hundreds of studies document the harmful effects of wood smoke pollution on human health.

Simply put, reducing wood smoke pollution reduces deaths.

More Evidence of the Benefits of Reducing Wood Smoke Pollution

Want to live longer? Breathe clean air.

New data published in the journal Epidemiology show the importance of fighting to reduce the particle pollution that is generated by wood burning and other activities.

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health report that declining air pollution levels continue to improve life expectancy in the U.S. Specifically, data from 545 counties nationwide, both metropolitan and rural, show an average decrease of 1.56 micrograms per cubic meter in particulate pollution from 2000 to 2007 that parallels a life expectancy increase of an average of 0.84 years.

In the winter, wood smoke pollution is the largest source of particle pollution in many communities. Numerous studies have shown associations between acute and chronic exposure to fine particle air pollution such as wood smoke and cardiopulmonary disease and mortality. Studies have also shown that reductions in air pollution are associated with reductions in adverse health effects as well as with improved life expectancy.

“Despite the fact that the U.S. population as a whole is exposed to much lower levels of air pollution than 30 years ago—because of great strides made to reduce people’s exposure—it appears that further reductions in air pollution levels continue to benefit public health,” said lead author Andrew Correia.

The senior author, Francesca Dominici, told the New York Times, “Our paper is strong evidence that additional investment in cleaning the air is beneficial.”

Everyone wants to live a long and healthy life. This winter, let’s work together to reduce wood smoke pollution and breathe cleaner air.

Particulate Matter and Exercise

Most people are aware that particulate matter (PM) pollution due to wood smoke is especially harmful to infants, the elderly, and those with cardiovascular and lung problems. What’s less well known is that PM pollution from wood smoke harms healthy people as well.

A recent article [2] in the journal Sports Medicine, “Small Things Make a Big Difference: Particulate Matter and Exercise,” reviewed the short- and long-term responses to PM inhalation during exercise and examined how PM exposure influences exercise performance.

The researchers found that breathing polluted air while exercising results in pulmonary inflammation, decreased lung function (both acute and chronic), an increased risk of asthma, vascular endothelial dysfunction, mild elevations in pulmonary artery pressure, and diminished exercise performance. Not exactly what a weekend warrior hopes to accomplish during a workout.

Wood smoke makes up over 30% of wintertime particulate pollution in many communities. As individuals, we can help reduce this source of air pollution by choosing not to burn wood. This winter, let’s work to get the word out about the hazards of wood smoke pollution—for the runners, for the bikers, for the hikers, for our families, and for ourselves.

Wood Smoke from Wildfires Leads to Lower Birth Weight

We’ve known for years that exposure to high levels of indoor wood smoke harms babies and children in developing countries. This raises the question: Does shorter-term exposure to wood smoke affect babies in developed countries?

This question is difficult to address, but a new paper by researchers at UC Berkeley shows that pregnant women exposed to wildfire smoke during Southern California’s epic 2003 fire season had babies with lower birth weights.

Specifically, researchers compared the birth weights from pregnancies that took place entirely before or after the wildfire event (n = 747,590) with those where wildfires occurred during the first (n = 60,270), second (n = 39,435), or third (n = 38,739) trimester. They found that women who were pregnant during the wildfires had slightly, but significantly, smaller babies.

There is no need to panic if you are pregnant and breathing smoke from a wildfire. Dr. Richard Chinnock, head of the Pediatrics Department at Loma Linda University Medical Center, said the 10-gram decrease in birth weight observed in the study is so slight that no one would notice a difference in the delivery room.

The bottom line is that the air a woman breathes when she is pregnant can affect her developing baby. Smoke exposure “could be one insult that adds to another insult for a cumulative effect.”

A recent review concludes that greater exposure to air pollution during pregnancy leads to higher infant mortality, lower birth weight, impaired lung development, increased later respiratory morbidity, and early alterations in immune development.

Clean air is healthy air, especially for developing babies.

Wood Fires: A Traditional Source of Air Pollution

Many of our neighbors who like to use their fireplaces and backyard wood pits claim that burning wood is a traditional method of cooking and heating that goes back thousands of years. If wood has been burned for thousands of years, they reason, wood smoke can’t possibly be harmful, right?

Wrong. Not only do the bodies of the earliest humans show the effects of breathing wood smoke, many people in developing nations today are suffering and dying from the ‘natural and traditional’ use of wood fires. Even when biomass is burned in more modern cook stoves, soot is released at extremely high levels.

A recent article, “Killer cookstoves: Indoor smoke deadly in poor countries,” reiterates this point. The numbers are staggering, with about 2 million deaths annually attributed to cooking smoke. In addition, the World Health Organization attributes 35% of chronic obstructive pulmonary deaths and 21 percent of lower respiratory infection deaths to indoor air pollution from burning solid fuel.

Despite the fact that open-hearth fires are traditional, the smoke that is generated is extremely harmful. In efforts to decrease illness and mortality from the traditional use of wood fires, as well as to mitigate the enormous impact of these fires on global warming, developed countries have donated millions of dollars towards cook stoves intended to lessen the harmful health effects of traditional fires. Unfortunately, such stoves continue to emit extremely high levels of soot, offering little if any improvement over traditional fires.

The bottom line? Wood smoke from traditional (and not-so-traditional) fires is harmful to your health. And this tradition is one that continues to kill, thousands of years after its inception.

Here at home, the time has come to adopt new traditions when we gather with family and friends. On a global scale, we must work to develop new, less toxic ways for people to stay warm and cook their food.

After all, ingenuity, innovation, and creative problem solving are American traditions as well.