Survey: Solar LEDs replace kerosene and lower household expenses in Haiti

February 26, 2014 · 0 comments

Survey: Solar LEDs replace kerosene and lower household expenses in Haiti | Source/Complete article: Rob Goodier, Engineering for Change, Feb 2014.

Excerpts: The study, a survey of households in Haiti, adds new evidence to claims that distributors have long held: Solar LEDs replace kerosene, save money, improve indoor air and increase safety and productivity. And good news for engineers, the respondents also suggested ways to improve the technology.

Haitians see better health and lower costs when they use the "Luci" solar LED lamp, a new survey has found. Photo courtesy of MPOWERD

Two surveys, one door-to-door and the other by mobile phone, gathered responses from 102 rural Haitians who use the Luci inflatable solar lantern, manufactured by the US company MPOWERD Inc. MPOWERD has distributed 5000 lights in Haiti and 200,000 worldwide, 38,000 of which are in developing countries, the company told E4C.

In Haiti, the lights reduced the reliance on kerosene by 96 percent, the survey found. Ninety percent of the respondents reported a decline in breathing problems and eye irritation. Thirty percent reported higher productivity in the evening and 94 percent said that school children’s grades have been higher since using the lights, according to results from the GlobeScan Foundation, which led the study to measure MPOWERD’s impact in the region.

Money savers
The lights don’t cost much – the suggested retail price is $14.99 in developing countries. So their cost appears to beat that of kerosene on the open market.

Before using the solar lights, most respondents reported spending $10-50 per month on kerosene, and 16 percent said they spent more than $50 per month on the fuel. After receiving the lights, 94 percent of the respondents reported spending less than $10 per month on kerosene.

Kerosene use did not cease entirely and two-thirds of the respondents said that they still spend time gathering fuel and candles for light, even after using the solar LEDs. That may be because families use kerosene or similar fuels for cooking, says Jacques-Philippe Piverger, MPOWERD’s CEO and co-founder. The families may may also supplement a solar light with a kerosene lantern when they need it, Piverger says.

 

 

Creating a saleable health product from clean cookstoves: Lao PDR

February 26, 2014 · 0 comments

Creating a saleable health product from clean cookstoves: Lao PDR, 2014.

Author: CQuestCapital

Four Good Reasons to Try in Lao PDR

1. Convincing evidence that cooking over open fires and with woody biomass is a major cause of disease, including in Lao PDR:

  • Laos may have highest burden of disease in world from household air pollution from biomass smoke
  • 223,000 years of life lost (YLL) worth 3.5% of GDP, assuming YLL as lost productivity using GDP per capita

2. Health Performance metric exists: Averted DALYs

  • WHO recognized measure of burden of disease

3. Improved measurement and analytical tools now exist to understand pollution exposure-response relationship

  • Pioneering work by Professor Kirk Smith and colleagues at University of California, Berkeley, has created tools to quantify and price reductions in DALYs

4. Firewood and woody biomass stove technology has matured rapidly over the past three years

  • clean modern wood-burning cookstoves are now commercially available at scale, including Phillips Gasifier stove (from Africa Clean Energy) and Biolite (even charge cell phone), USA.

 

Innovative Health Impacts: Result Based Financing to Promote Clean Cookstoves

February 26, 2014 · 0 comments

Innovative Health Impacts: Result Based Financing to Promote Clean Cookstoves, 2014.

Heather Adair-Rohani, WHO.
Email: ADAIRROHANIH@WHO.INT

Why Use DALYs?

  • More inclusive measure of population health that includes both mortality & morbidity
  • Quantifiable & reflects epidemiological shifts in disease
  • Comparability: useful for assessing & prioritizing public health policy and intervention options
  • Some examples of being used previously to assess/prioritize public health interventions (e.g. water quality in both developed & developing countries)

Solid fuel use is a major risk factor for acute coronary syndromes among rural women

February 26, 2014 · 0 comments

Solid fuel use is a major risk factor for acute coronary syndromes among rural women: a matched case control study. Public Health, Jan 2014.

Authors: Z Fatami, et al.

Objectives – Almost half of the world’s population uses solid fuel for cooking, exposing women to high levels of particulate pollution in indoor air. The risk of acute coronary syndrome (ACS) was assessed among rural women, according to their use of solid fuel.

Study design – Matched case control study.

Methods – Data were collected at a public tertiary care hospital in a rural district of Pakistan. Seventy-three women with ACS were compared with controls, individually matched for sex and age (±5 years), who were admitted to hospital for other reasons. Fuels used for cooking and exposures to potentially confounding variables were ascertained through a questionnaire administered at interview and measurement of height and weight. Conditional logistic regression was used to estimate odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs).

Results – After adjustment for potential confounding factors, current use of solid fuel was strongly associated with ACS (OR 4.8, 95% CI: 1.5–14.8), and risk was lowest in women who had last used solid fuel more than 15 years earlier. The population attributable fraction for ACS in relation to current use of solid fuel was 49.0% (95% CI: 41.3%–57.4%).

Conclusions – These findings support the hypothesis that indoor air pollution from use of solid fuel is an important cause of ACS. Our study demonstrates the feasibility of case-control studies in rural populations of women to address this question, and is an encouragement to larger and statistically more powerful investigations.

 

 

 

Invitation to join the Clean Cookstove Community on Linkedin

February 21, 2014 · 0 comments

Dear Colleagues:

This Community is facilitated by the USAID WASHplus project. We hope this Community will serve as a crowdsourcing platform to share information and collaborate on issues/problems that are faced by researchers and practitioners. We welcome your comments and participation. Please give a brief introduction about your work and interests when you join the community. Also, please suggest topics for discussion.

Dan Campbell, Knowledge Resources Specialist
WASHplus Project
1825 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington DC 20009
Email: dacampbell@fhi360.org
Phone: (202) 884-8887
Website: http://www.washplus.org

Biomass fuel use and the exposure of children to particulate air pollution in southern Nepal

February 20, 2014 · 0 comments

Biomass fuel use and the exposure of children to particulate air pollution in southern Nepal. Env International, May 2014.

Authors: D. Devakumara, et al.

The exposure of children to air pollution in low resource settings is believed to be high because of the common use of biomass fuels for cooking. We used microenvironment sampling to estimate the respirable fraction of air pollution (particles with median diameter less than 4 μm) to which 7–9 year old children in southern Nepal were exposed. Sampling was conducted for a total 2649 h in 55 households, 8 schools and 8 outdoor locations of rural Dhanusha.

We conducted gravimetric and photometric sampling in a subsample of the children in our study in the locations in which they usually resided (bedroom/living room, kitchen, veranda, in school and outdoors), repeated three times over one year. Using time activity information, a 24-hour time weighted average was modeled for all the children in the study. Approximately two-thirds of homes used biomass fuels, with the remainder mostly using gas.

The exposure of children to air pollution was very high. The 24-hour time weighted average over the whole year was 168 μg/m3. The non-kitchen related samples tended to show approximately double the concentration in winter than spring/autumn, and four times that of the monsoon season. There was no difference between the exposure of boys and girls. Air pollution in rural households was much higher than the World Health Organization and the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Nepal recommendations for particulate exposure.

An Integrated Risk Function for Estimating the Global Burden of Disease Attributable to Ambient Fine Particulate Matter Exposure

February 20, 2014 · 0 comments

An Integrated Risk Function for Estimating the Global Burden of Disease Attributable to Ambient Fine Particulate Matter Exposure. Environ Health Perspect; 2014, DOI:10.1289/ehp.1307049

Authors: Richard T. Burnett, et al.

Background: Estimating the burden of disease attributable to long-term exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in ambient air requires knowledge of both the shape and magnitude of the relative risk function (RR). However, there is inadequate direct evidence to identify the shape of the mortality RR functions at high ambient concentrations observed in many places in the world.

Objective: Develop relative risk (RR) functions over entire global exposure range for causes of mortality in adults: ischemic heart disease (IHD), cerebrovascular disease (stroke), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and lung cancer (LC). In addition, develop RR functions for the incidence of acute lower respiratory infection (ALRI) that can be used to estimate mortality and lost-years of healthy life in children less than 5 years old.

Methods: An Integrated Exposure-Response (IER) model was fit by integrating available RR information from studies of ambient air pollution (AAP), second hand tobacco smoke (SHS), household solid cooking fuel (HAP), and active smoking (AS). AS exposures were converted to estimated annual PM2.5 exposure equivalents using inhaled doses of particle mass. Population attributable fractions (PAF) were derived for every country based on estimated world-wide ambient PM2.5concentrations.

Results: The IER model was a superior predictor of RR compared to seven other forms previously used in burden assessments. The PAF (%) attributable to AAP exposure varied among countries from: 2-41 for IHD, 1-43 for stroke, < 1-21 for COPD, < 1-25 for LC, and < 1-38 for ALRI.

Conclusions: We developed a fine particulate mass-based RR model that covered the global range of exposure by integrating RR information from different combustion types that generate emissions of particulate matter. The model can be updated as new RR information becomes available.

Impact Evaluation of Improved Cooking Stoves in Burkina Faso

February 20, 2014 · 0 comments

Impact Evaluation of Improved Cooking Stoves in Burkina Faso, 2013.

Director Policy and Operations Evaluations Department (IOB). Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands.

This report combines the results of two rigorous impact studies on activities implemented by FAFASO: one study on portable metallic ICS for domestic use and one on fixed ICS for use by artisanal beer brewers (most of whom are female). The evaluation was set out to answer two main questions: firstly, if the development of a market for ICS has triggered uptake of ICS by households and productive units and, secondly, what the impacts have been in terms of reducing wood energy use, saving money and time, and improving the workload and health of the users.

 

 

How do People in Rural India Perceive Improved Stoves and Clean Fuel?

February 20, 2014 · 0 comments

How do People in Rural India Perceive Improved Stoves and Clean Fuel? Evidence from Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2014, 11(2), 1341-1358.

Authors: Vasundhara Bhojvaid, et al.

Improved cook stoves (ICS) have been widely touted for their potential to deliver the triple benefits of improved household health and time savings, reduced deforestation and local environmental degradation, and reduced emissions of black carbon, a significant short-term contributor to global climate change. Yet diffusion of ICS technologies among potential users in many low-income settings, including India, remains slow, despite decades of promotion.

This paper explores the variation in perceptions of and preferences for ICS in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, as revealed through a series of semi-structured focus groups and interviews from 11 rural villages or hamlets. We find cautious interest in new ICS technologies, and observe that preferences for ICS are positively related to perceptions of health and time savings. Other respondent and community characteristics, e.g., gender, education, prior experience with clean stoves and institutions promoting similar technologies, and social norms as perceived through the actions of neighbours, also appear important. Though they cannot be considered representative, our results suggest that efforts to increase adoption and use of ICS in rural India will likely require a combination of supply-chain improvements and carefully designed social marketing and promotion campaigns, and possibly incentives, to reduce the up-front cost of stoves.

Cooking Smoke and Public Health: What We Saw in Kenya | United Nations Foundation

February 13, 2014 · 0 comments

See on Scoop.it – Cookstoves

Connecting you with the United Nations (Chloe Shields: Cooking Smoke and Public Health: What We Saw in Kenya, #cookstoves, http://t.co/pjNegmvJsW via @sharethis)…

See on unfoundationblog.org

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