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Your charcoal stove could kill you
Use of less-clean fuel like charcoal in such inefficient stoves is placing the health of many Ugandans in danger. Photo by Edgar R. Batte.
What you need to know:
In Uganda, most people rely on charcoal, firewood and other biomass to cook. While they have no better alternatives, it eventually harms their health
Every morning, Ms Mary Kisembo wakes and collects firewood to light a fire to prepare her family a morning meal. The mother of four from Kibaale District assembles three fire stones inside her kitchen, underneath which she places firewood and lights the fire.
However, before she can fetch her utensils the fire dies releasing smoke, which forms a thick cloud in the kitchen, where her two children are seated anxiously waiting for breakfast. Amidst incessant coughing, Ms Kisembe blows air into the fire, until it lights up again, leaving her toddlers coughing. And this is her routine, three times, every day.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) report presented at the recent Rio + 20 summit on sustainable development, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, many of the world’s poorest women and children spend hours of their day in poorly ventilated rooms, breathing smoke from inefficient biomass, coal/charcoal cookstoves and kerosene lamps.
Dangerous exposure
This exposure to indoor air pollution, the global health institution estimates, kills nearly two million people annually, mostly women and children. In the report, the WHO states that 50 per cent of pneumonia deaths among children under five, are due to particulate matter inhaled from indoor air pollution, 54 per cent of chronic obstructive lung disease like bronchitis are as a result of indoor air pollution, while two per cent of lung cancers are from the same source. Other diseases associated with indoor air pollution included asthma, tuberculosis and cardio vascular diseases.
In Uganda, 95 per cent of the country’s population relies on biomass for their energy sources, meaning that majority Ugandans are exposed to indoor air pollution, data from the National Environment Management Authority shows. But what exactly is contained in this smoke that is so dangerous? Dr Ruth Mubeezi, a lecturer at the Department of Disease Control and Environment Health at Makerere University School of Public Health, says smoke contains poisonous substances like carbon monoxide which when inhaled, breaks down the nervous system, carbon dioxide, which reduces the amount of oxygen carried in blood, and that specific wood types when burnt can damage the respiratory system, which, in addition to causing the earlier mentioned diseases, aggravate other conditions like high blood pressure.
Dr Mubeezi says the problem of indoor air pollution is escalating in the country, as more people move to urban dwellings and have to live in poor structures with narrow or no ventilators, which have sprouted in urban centres of late.
Resort to cleaner fuel
“Ventilation should be one hundredth of the floor area while the window should be a tenth of the floor but we see houses even without ventilators being inhibited every day. Obviously this shows that indoor air pollution is on the rise as most people will carry their charcoal stoves to cook inside the house,” Dr Mubeezi says.
“[The authorities] should not approve such houses and people educated about indoor air pollution.”
She advises that everyone using a charcoal stove should do it outside the house. In the event that they cannot, they should keep the door open and that those who can afford to should improvise mechanisms to reduce smoke in the house like chimneys.
But indoor pollution is also poverty-related. The increasing fuel prices and prevailing hard economic times in Uganda, means that many more have to be pushed down the poverty ladder and have to resort to less clean fuels such as, wood fuel contrary to cleaner fuel like hydro, solar and wind being advocated for in the new global wave of sustainable development.
The Director of Low Developed Country Environment Centre, Mr Phillip Gwage, says these cleaner energies are not only good for human health but will protect the country’s forest reserves which are dwindling every day. He urges the leadership of the country to commit more resources into developing these new energies.
“The country was supposed to produce 2,578MW of hydro power by 2013, but it has only managed to produce 441MW. As the country develops, it is definitely going to need more energy , there is need for Africa, as a whole to have a strong political will to commit resources to the new energies,” said Gwage.
With less than five per cent of the population accessing clean energy, indoor air pollution remains an emerging threat to the population, and achievement of the health-related Millennium Development Goals is at stake.
