It is the worst form of irony where a world of hungry communities is the same world where trying to feed families can cause their premature death. Nearly three billion of us around the world cook food and heat our homes with outmoded traditional cookstoves or open fires. Two million premature deaths occur every year due to smoke exposure from cooking over charcoal and wood without ventilation. Exposure to cookstove smoke is the fifth worst risk factor for disease in the developing world, causing lung cancer and other pulmonary disease, most often affecting women and children. These dirty cook methods also wreak havoc on the environment…and the answer to the problem is so simple.
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves has a strategy to get 100 million homes using clean cookstoves that don’t decimate the health of the residents, by the year 2020. The technology and fuel may change form one region to another, but the black lung death threat is removed from the equation of caring for, and feeding, loved ones. Go to the website and find ways to get involved. The issue is far more widespread than you likely imagine, and it is an issue upon which we can have a direct effect. We’re getting wiser every day, and this one just needs the message to spread to begin taking concrete steps, and saving lives. Cooking shouldn’t kill.
Now if we can just get food to be available for every household to cook something…anything…
Change by Doing 
Posted by Anonymous on July 15, 2012 at 2:36 AM
Just as your “What’s Up?” lists suggests, Clean Cookstoves” is just part of the overall campaign to resolve problems which are related to each other. The article mentioned how now it’s important for those with the new cookstoves to cook something – anything – which brings in all those hunger/food focused organizations. The Peru landscape suggested that Heiffer which focuses on livestock might and is interested in this region. Clean water is needed to cook with and clean the stoves after use. Etc. Attempts have been made by some on Tweeter to suggest that there’s individualistic, detached, indifference among all when all the groups mentioned are so related to one another. Sometimes even depended on each other. Connecting the Global Alliance with the UN World Food Programme would create the linkage mentioned.of needing something to cook. Heiffer focuses on self-reliance which is what those using cookstoves display and those who provide foods that is immediately eaten might also take an interest in providing foods that those with cookstoves might want.