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India's killer cookers a recipe for disaster
CROUCHED in an east Delhi slum, Sunita grimaces and turns her face from the acrid smoke pouring out of the stove cooking her dinner. The young mother is concerned about the health effects of wood-burning or kerosene stoves but insists the cow dung that fuels her cooker, known as a chulha, is good for you.
"We haven't experienced any problems with smoke and the smoke from the dung is not harmful, I believe," she says.
It's a common belief among the 800 million-odd Indians who depend on chulhas for cooking, heat and often light. But the World Health Organisation estimates pollutants from chulhas - whether they burn coal, wood, kerosene, dung or other biomass - are responsible for the premature deaths of more than 440,000 Indian children each year, and 44,000 women, mostly through chronic respiratory diseases.
Extrapolate that figure across the world's poor nations and the number of deaths caused from the stoves rises to 1.6 million, half of those in children under five.