Case Study Public Health Context

Approximately three billion people are exposed to household air pollution (HAP) (WEO-2017) (https://www.who.int/airpollution/household/en/). HAP primarily stems from cooking and heating with inefficient biomass burning stoves, where biomass includes both wood collected from forests as well as harvest crop residue. HAP caused by the inefficient use of traditional or inefficiently burning cook stoves has been linked to 3.8 million people a year dying prematurely. Fifty-five percent of these deaths are from cardiovascular disease. HAP ranks second among "risk factors" for mortality in low income countries.