Cooking with gas ‘worse for your lungs than city pollution’

COOKING with a gas hob could be worse for our lungs than the air of a polluted city street, it has been claimed.

Indoor air pollution is a growing field of research as scientists try to learn as much about pollutants inside as they do outside. A study from RMI, a Us-based nonprofit organisation which wants to speed up the transition to renewable energy sources, found last month that “12.7 per cent of childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use”.

The paper, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, also claimed that if no gas stoves were used then up to a fifth of childhood asthma cases could be prevented.

“[The] risk associated with a gas stove is likely to be larger than living in a polluted city,” says Prof Steffen Loft, from the University of Copenhagen, who was not involved in the research, told New Scientist.

Other scientists, such as Jonathan Grigg, professor of paediatric respiratory and environmental medicine at Queen Mary University London, say that it is difficult to compare outside nitrogen dioxide levels from car exhausts with an indoor stove’s emissions.

“I can’t say how bad exposure of a gas hob is compared to a roadside because it depends on how long you cook for and where you are on a road,” he said.

Previous studies have shown that indoor air pollution could pose a risk to health, especially for children.

Pollution from wood-burning stoves, for example, led to the creation of smokeless fuels and restrictions on what can and can not be burnt.

Prof Grigg said more was being learnt about the harms of other indoor pollution sources, such as nitrogen dioxide from gas stoves.

“It’s been known for some time and there’s increasing evidence that indoor nitrogen dioxide is associated with the development of asthma, for example,” he said. “Long-term exposure is associated with the development of respiratory diseases.”

He said that living in an all-gas home, compared with a home with no gas at all, was likely to increase the likelihood of an adult getting persistent asthma by a factor of five. “Five times increased risk is pretty significant in the grand scheme of things,” Prof Grigg said.