Industrial Hygiene

Between 3 and 4 billion people globally rely on the inefficient combustion of solid fuels – including wood, dung, crop residues, and charcoal – to meet basic household energy needs. The household air pollution resulting from these activities is a major contributor to the global burden disease, mainly through particulate pollution exposure that results in an estimated 2.3 million deaths yearly, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. This talk will provide a historical perspective on the identification of solid fuel combustion as a health risk, with a focus on the...

Background: Clean cookstove interventions can theoretically reduce exposure to household air pollution and benefit health, but this requires near-exclusive use of these types of stoves with the simultaneous disuse of traditional stoves. Previous cookstove trials have reported low adoption of new stoves and/or extensive continued traditional stove use.

Methods: The Household Air Pollution Intervention Network (HAPIN) trial randomized 3195 pregnant women in Guatemala, India, Peru, and Rwanda to either a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) stove and fuel...

In the near field/far field (NF/FF) dispersion construct, the analytical solutions for the NF and FF concentration equations, respectively denoted CNF(t) and CFF(t) in mg/m3, are coupled in their mathematical derivation. Depending on the form of the contaminant emission rate function G(t) (mg/min), deriving CNF(t) and CFF(t) can range from being relatively easy to impossible. A method is presented to more easily approximate these concentration functions. The method decouples the NF and FF equations by treating the NF as an isolated well-mixed space with volume VNF (m3) and supply/...