Ghana probes effects of cooking over fires
Ghana's Kintampo Health Research Centre (KHRC) has started a study into harmful cooking practices, such as cooking over open fires, which may cause adverse respiratory tract infections.
The study, known as the Biomass Project, is a collaborative research activity between the centre and the Biomass Working Group at Columbia University in the United States.
The results of the research will be important in finding an intervention to control respiratory diseases in Ghana and Africa if found successful and beneficial.
Dr Kwaku Poku Asante, a clinical research fellow at KHRC, told journalists visiting the centre that most people in rural areas used charcoal and firewood for cooking and children suffered from the harmful effects of the smoke because mothers strapped them on their backs while cooking in enclosed areas.
Saying that pneumonia and other respiratory diseases were linked to such bad cooking practices, Dr Poku Asante said a survey had already been conducted among 140,000 people in Kintampo North and Kintampo South districts to gather information about their cooking practices.
He said exposure instruments had been tested among 33 households to measure the amount of harmful smoke emitting from those cooking practices.
This data is being analysed to formulate an intervention that would be used to source for funds to build stoves that would deal effectively with the harmful smoke.
Information from the KHRS indicated that reducing exposure to indoor air pollution was a critical initiative because globally about three billion people cooked with biomass fuels that led to 1.6 million deaths a year.
In Ghana, more than 97% of rural households cook with biomass fuel.
Article published courtesy of BuaNews
