Health effects of indoor air pollution : the global picture

Until recently the health community lacked a coherent, and compehensive dataset describing the extent and distribution of ill-health.Thanks to the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) database, updated yearly since 1996, a broad set of additional analyses can be done : 200 causes of death and illness by age and sex, separately for 14 regions of the world have been delineated.In 2000, the World Health Organization (WHO) has brought together about 100 specialists from 30 institutions worldwide to conduct a first large-scale multi-risk-factor Comparative Risk Assessment (CRA) exercice.Since all the groups were engaged together, coherence and consistency were enforced.30 major risks factors were examined, among them Indoor air pollution (IAP) was found to be one of the 10 most important causes of ill-health.The global burden of disease and death due to indoor air pollution is analyzed in this paper and presented in a table.