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Cooking up clean air in Africa

7 Jan 2013

Where there's smoke, there's disease? They're little more than a pile of burning sticks with a stew pot atop them, but these open fires or basic cook stoves have been linked to the premature deaths of 4 million people annually, many of them young children, writes Cheryl Dybas, of the National Science Foundation.

Three billion people around the world rely on wood, charcoal, agricultural waste, animal dung, and coal for household cooking needs. They often burn these fuels inside their homes in poorly ventilated stoves or in open fires.

The resulting miasma exposes families to air pollution levels as much as 50 times greater than World Health Organisation guidelines for clean air, setting the stage for heart and lung disease.

Household air pollution can also lead to pneumonia in children and low birth weight in infants. Read the complete article.

Source: WeCanChangeOurWorld

WeCanChangeOurWorld is an online social network in the sustainable social transformation space in South Africa. Our objectives will be to enable all brands, organisations and practitioners to congregate to create tangible intellectual assets, to share key learnings, ideas and best practice in this vibrant and essential sector for our country's growth and sustainability for all its people. WeCanChangeOurWorld aims to be a change agent for brands serious about sustainable transformation in South Africa. The portal is a platform for all companies and organisations involved in sustainable brand programmes and initiatives to connect with influencers and non-governmental/governmental organisations involved in sustainable social transformation in South Africa.

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