We know that burning wood and charcoal indoors using traditional cooking methods, like the typical three rocks and pot technique, can have a major impact on a family’s health, especially for the mother and children who are most often the ones spending time in the kitchen.
As we’ve pointed out many times before, more people die from the consequences of exposure to indoor air pollution from cooking and heating using biomass than die from malaria and tuberculosis. That’s about 2 million people each year. By 2030, indoor air pollution is expected to take an even heavier toll and will actually surpass deaths by HIV/AIDS-related infections.
But it’s not just the indoor air pollution that will kill you.
We also know that as woodfuel becomes more scarce in parts of Africa, families are having to choose between cooking and eating. That’s because the cost of a bundle of wood is becoming more expensive as the biomass feedstock dwindles.
Equally alarming are reports of an increase in water-borne disease for similar reasons: families can no longer afford to boil water for the amount of time necessary to kill pathogens.
And now comes news about the increased rate of disappearance of plant-based medicines due to the growing and unsustainable demand for charcoal. This story comes to us from the VOA and is reported from Tanzania.
Africa’s Malaria-Fighting Trees Threatened
May 2nd, 2011 / Steve Baragona | Washington, D.C.
Researchers warn that East African plants that could cure malaria could disappear before scientists have a chance to study them.
The World Health Organization estimates 800,000 people die of malaria each year, most of them young children in Africa.
A new book by scientists at the World Agroforestry Centre, “Common Antimalarial Trees and Shrubs of East Africa,” identifies 22 tree and shrub species that traditional healers in East Africa use to fight the disease.
But, the researchers say, they are being cut down for cooking fuel and other uses and could disappear before scientists have a chance to study them.
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