Respiratory Illness and Household Air Pollution: Problem Identification and Intervention

This study is an expanded literature review that identifies the key concepts of Household Air Pollution (HAP) and the relationship it has with respiratory illness. This study identifies twenty research studies that inspect HAP and respiratory symptoms across a number of communities that utilize biomass fuel as their primary fuel source. It seeks to identify the problems that come with HAP, such as childhood respiratory infection, COPD, and other respiratory illnesses. This review seeks to identify if people in low to middle income countries, who utilize biomass fuel sources, see and improved respiratory outcome from using modern cookstoves and other interventions compared to those who do not receive improvements during various research studies. The methods used to obtain sources included keyword searches on two databases, PubMed and CINAHL. The keywords included “household air pollution”, “respiratory illness”, “third world countries”, “interventions”, “solutions”, “cookstoves”, “respiratory infection or respiratory illness”, “interventions or strategies or best practices”, and “developing countries or developing nations or third world or low-income countries”. A few articles were found by utilizing the citations and recommended articles in previously selected sources that were populated by the database. The results of the review concluded that exposure to HAP correlates to respiratory symptoms in study participants. The introduction of improved cookstoves and other interventions showed an improvement in the respiratory symptoms, but the interventions saw difficulties with implementation at times. The improvements did not always lower the amount of toxins released enough to be lower than the institutional guidelines utilized in the studies. This study can be applied as an overview of HAP and the problems it causes for the people exposed to it