BETTER AIR,
HEALTHIER
FAMILIES By Leslie Church
While cooking your dinner over an open flame may sound nice for a camping trip, imagine having that fire permanently located inside your house; the throatchoking smoke, the stinging, watery eyes, the walls blackened with soot. And those are just the problems you can see. Inside the body, smoke from a cooking fire wreaks havoc on the lungs and cardiovascular system. Those most affected are the ones doing the cooking—usually women—and the young children staying close to their mothers. Almost half of the world’s population cooks over solid fuels like wood, dung, and coal. Pollutants from the smoke damage the body’s immune system response and more than double the chances of getting sick with a lung infection like pneumonia, the leading killer of young children in low-resource parts of the world. Main photo: A new gas cookstove in a kitchen in Guatemala. Inset: Lisa Thompson poses with some of the team in Guatemala. Courtesy of Lisa Thompson.
28 Emory Nursing | EMORYNURSINGMAGAZINE.EMORY.EDU
