For decades, scientists have been calling for reducing air pollution, as a result of emissions resulting from factory activities, car traffic, and power plant smokestacks, but researchers are now increasingly turning their attention to the air that people breathe inside homes, and they have identified an important device as the main source of pollutants harmful to health. A person is inside his house, which is the gas stove.
In this picture, we see Yani Kashtan, a doctoral researcher at Stanford University in the United States of America, lighting a gas stove in a house in the Harlem neighborhood in New York City, as part of a study he is conducting on indoor emissions and their impact on the home environment. The study conducted by Kashtan, along with other scientists and researchers from the university, shed light on the extent to which Americans are exposed in their homes to nitrogen dioxide, which comes from burning coal and gas and is a major cause of asthma and other respiratory diseases.
Researchers have found that across the United States, people are exposed to amounts of nitrogen dioxide from gas stoves, and for periods of time, that often exceed standards set by both the World Health Organization and the US Environmental Protection Agency. As with outdoor pollution, researchers found that poorer households may be more at risk. They also found that because the gas spreads more easily into smaller spaces, people living in homes smaller than 800 square feet had four times more exposure to nitrogen dioxide in the long term than people living in homes larger than 3,000 square feet.
Although chefs who directly use a gas stove are exposed to more nitrogen dioxide than others, the pollution also travels into living rooms and bedrooms. For long periods of time, researchers concerned with environmental safety have ignored the dangers of indoor air pollution, even though it is the air we breathe most of the time. This is a neglect that the new study by scientists at Stanford University in the United States is trying to put an end to by saying that gas stoves represent an environmental and health risk that should be taken into account.
(Image from the New York Times service)
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