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He claims most are women and children living in poorly ventilated rural areas

Smoke - mainly from indoor coal and wood-burning stoves - is killing nearly half a million residents a year on the mainland, according to a leading international environmental health expert.

Kirk Smith, an indoor air pollution specialist with the World Health Organisation,  said the 420,000 deaths was more than half of the number who died each year from air pollution-related illnesses on the mainland.

He said most of the victims were women and children living in poorly ventilated rural homes where coal and wood stoves were used for cooking and heating.

The age-old practice releases lethal amounts of dust and toxins such as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and lead.

According to Dr Smith, who is also a professor of the School of Public Health at the University of California in Berkeley, about 180 million mainland rural households still use indoor and open-air coal and  wood-burning stoves.

'The women, who spend most of their time cooking, are dying from chronic lung disease, while pneumonia is killing the children,' Dr Smith said.

According to the World Health Organisation, indoor air pollution ranks as the seventh largest cause of death in China after alcoholism, blood pressure problems, tobacco, traffic accidents, malnutrition and occupational hazards.

Dr Smith recommended long-term and short-term approaches. He urged the government to improve the quality of, and access to, health-care facilities in rural areas.

'Many of the deaths caused by air pollution are bacterial, not viral, which could be, in theory, treated by antibiotics,' he said.

For the immediate future, he said the government should boost efforts to increase the use of cleaner energy sources in rural homes, such as natural gas stoves and heaters, and improved ventilation.

In the early 1980s, the government launched a programme that introduced 200 million stoves to coal and wood-burning households. However, the majority of the families were urban residents.

He said improving rural health was critical if the government wanted to succeed in turning around the sector's sagging economic fortunes.

'Health is development and development is health,' Dr Smith said.



Stoves burning coal and wood are killing 420,000 a year, says expert