Daily Personal Exposure of Women Cooks to Respirable Particulate Matters during Cooking with Solid Bio-Fuels in a Rural Community of West Bengal, India

摘要

About 60% of the Indian population are still relying on the traditional bio-fuels comprising of firewood, cow dung cake, crop residue etc. More than 85% of the rural households use these unprocessed bio-fuels for cooking purposes. Biomass fuel burning in daily cooking with traditional inefficient earthen stoves, in an un-vented kitchen, usually emits very high levels of smoke containing a complex mixture of a wide array of potentially hazardous pollutants, especially, particulate matters of varying size range. Size smaller than the PM10 particles, can penetrate further deep into the gas exchange region of the lungs and are termed as the respirable particulate matter with 50% cut point at 4 μm. Respirable particulate exposure assessment is particularly important in case of health hazard explanation because it can enter into the deepest of the lungs. Personal exposures to respirable particulate matters were assessed during cooking hours in the varied opened kitchens, considering the seasonal change and the meal preparation as covariates. Maximum variability for the particulate exposures was observed in the kitchens with openness range of 15–60%. Greater particulate exposures were found in the least opened kitchens. Two-way ANCOVA showed significant impact of seasonal change on the differential opened kitchens for personal exposure to respirable particulate matters. Tukey post hoc test reveals significant mean differences of respirable particulates in all pair-wise seasonal combinations and in all the pair-wise openness type combinations except for the < 15% and 15–30% opened kitchens. Winter season came out to be one of the significant predictor for the personal exposure prediction model. Across all the seasons and kitchen openness, average exposure concentration of the respirable particulate matters was 1445 μg m–3.