Climate change;Indeed Another Silent Killer: WHO Says 98,000 Nigerian Women Die Yearly From Cooking With Firewood

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Did You know that Thousands of women dies yearly as a result of inhaling dangerous smoke while cooking with firewood”?

WHO says that over 98,000 Nigerian women die annually from the use of firewood.

“If a woman cooks breakfast, lunch and dinner, it is equivalent to smoking between three and 20 packets of cigarette a day.

“The death from this sector contributes to 10 per cent of global annual death and it is bigger than tuberculosis, HIV and AIDS and malaria combined, and it is only killing women.’’

“The smoke from these fires pumps a harmful fug of fine particles and carbon monoxide into homes. Lousy ventilation then prevents that smoke from escaping, sending fine particle levels soaring 100 times higher than the limits that the WHO considers acceptable.”

As a result of this,A climatologist, Dr Auwal Abdulssalam, has consequently urged the three levels of government in the country to provide safer energy for cooking to protect the lives of rural women using firewood.

Abdulsalam said this in Kaduna at the opening of a training workshop on Disaster Risk Reduction and Management for Volunteers, organised by an NGO, that smoke-induced death from firewood has been on the rise in the country.

“Many African women are exposed to different types of diseases as a result of using various kinds of firewood for cooking without knowing the type of trees they are burning.

“The smoke of some of these trees is really very bad and harmful to human health.”
Abdulsalam also urged government to sanction indiscriminate felling of trees, saying the practice is posing serious threat to agriculture.

The climatologist also spoke on the effect of global warming to humans, animals and the environment due to unsustainable rise in the level of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and water vapour.

Meanwhile network of Climate and environemental reporters in African urged African union to find means of reducing the rate of women dying yearly as a result of inhaling dangerous smoke while cooking

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