Countries must develop better protection against wood burning emissions
UPHE’s Dr. Brian Moench had a letter to the editor published in The BMJ, a major medical journal.
Doctors and Scientists Against Wood Smoke Pollution is an international coalition with the goal of educating the public and governments around the world on the health consequences of biomass burning, including the use of wood stoves.1
In the UK, Australia, and the US, trade organisations of businesses that sell wood burning appliances engage in business practices that are far too similar to the notorious campaigns of the tobacco industry. Parallels to the tobacco industry don’t stop with their sales tactics. Over 70 000 studies published in the past seven decades have shown indisputably that air pollution, from virtually any source, causes premature death and a list of diseases nearly as long as the one associated with smoking cigarettes.23 Laboratory studies have found that free radicals in wood smoke are active much longer than those from cigarette smoke.4
These trade organisations minimise, or even flip, that narrative to imply that wood burning can be good for you by lowering blood pressure and stress. Those claims are discussed in a report prepared by Clean Stove Consultants for the Stove Industry Alliance, an obvious conflict of interest. The report collated interviews with wood stove owners about their attitudes towards their stoves.5 Claims about blood pressure benefits referred to relaxation from watching videos of operating fireplaces, not inhaling wood burning emissions. The effects on health of increasing wildfires indicate the opposite,6 and the neighbours of wood burners reap none of that relaxing effect. In most European countries, over half of urban fine particulate matter (PM2.5) comes from the residential sector, which is overwhelmingly from biomass burning.7
Regulations against secondhand cigarette smoke have become commonplace. It is long overdue that all countries develop better protection against secondhand wood burning emissions.