Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
It is easy to recognize that using dung, crop residues, or wood for fuel
indoors, as is typical for cooking and heating in homes in rural and less
developed nations in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, will generate large
amounts of soot and perhaps other air pollutants as well. It is visible as
it enters the air. Soot from cooking is not a major problem in developed
and wealthy nations such as the United States, but even normal cooking
using modern gas or electric stoves generates pollution. Experiments by
the EPA have determined that deep-frying food for 15 minutes on a stove
generates trillions of particles, nearly all with diameters less than 0.1
micrometer, the sizes that not only get into your smallest airways but
are absorbed into your bloodstream. The deep frying increases the
number of particles throughout the home by as much as tenfold.
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Heating water for coffee produces about half as many particles. Exactly
how these particles are generated and how toxic they are is unknown,
and no one knows how to reduce their occurrence. We can be sure that
no family is going to stop cooking.
Smoking
Tobacco is the world's largest single cause of preventable death. Five
million people die every year from smoking, a number that will grow to
perhaps 10 million in the next twenty years.
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Cigarettes are well known
to be the cause of emphysema and 80 percent of lung cancers, and they
are implicated in cardiac and other health problems.
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About 440,000
Americans die prematurely each year because of cigarette smoke. As a
result of increased taxes on cigarettes, an increasing number of smoke-
free areas in many cities, and intense publicity about the dangers of
smoking, the number of smokers has been declining since 1981. Cigarette
sales rose consistently from 2.5 billion in 1900 to a high of 631.5 billion
in 1980, but have decreased every year since then to a low of 360 billion
in 2007, according to the Department of Agriculture. In 2008, there
were still 46 million smokers in the United States, 20.6 percent of the
adult population. The average smoker smoked 8,295 cigarettes; at 20
cigarettes per pack, that is 415 packs, more than one pack a day.
Although 70 percent of smokers want to quit and 35 percent attempt
to quit each year, less than 5 percent succeed.
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The low rate of successful
quitting and the high rate of relapse are related to the effect of nicotine
addiction.
Prior to the past few years, tobacco growers enjoyed large govern-
ment subsidies, awarded to them despite warning by the surgeon general,
the government's chief medical offi cial, fi fty years ago and in succeeding
