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Research in the past decade has identified numerous health risks tochildren who are exposed regularly to smoke from open fires used incooking. But until now, no one has associated smoke from cookingfires with deficits in cognitive development, said Mary Gauvain,professor of psychology at UC Riverside. She and Robert L. Munroefrom Pitzer College co-authored "Exposure to open-fire cookingand cognitive performance in children," which appears in the International Journal of Environmental Health Research. Their research comes as international public and private agenciesadvocate, through the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, the useof clean and efficient cooking stoves in the developing world. U.S.Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is among the alliance'ssupporters because of the impacts of open-fire cooking on childhealth and global warming. Gauvain said she and Munroe wondered about the effects of open-firecooking on child cognitive development after reading a December2009 article in The New Yorker about efforts to invent stoves thatare inexpensive and could replace cooking methods that use wood,dung or straw. Previous studies have shown that children's exposure to carbonmonoxide and toxins in smoke from open-fire cooking poses risks toimmune systems and susceptibility to respiratory ailments,including pneumonia -- the leading cause of death among youngchildren worldwide -- and changes to the lungs and other organs,including the brain, to children ages 3 and younger. "We wondered if open-fire cooking could have anything to dowith some of the differences in cognitive development we had seenin an earlier study," she recalled. "We decided to lookat our cognitive data in relation to cooking methods." Using previously collected data from the late 1970s, Gauvain andMunroe studied approximately 200 children ages 3 to 9 living intraditional communities in Belize, Kenya, Nepal and American Samoa.Two of the communities -- Logoli in Kenya and Newars in Nepal --consistently used open-fire cooking with wood, dung or strawindoors. In American Samoa, cooking was done on kerosene stoves.Garifuna families in Belize, were split almost evenly among thosewho cooked only with wood on open fires, those who used bothopen-fire and kerosene-stove cooking, and those who cooked nearlyexclusively with kerosene stoves. The California researchers examined the results of cognitiveassessments that tested the children's block-building, memory andpattern-recognition skills, and observed structured play. Thelatter is play that involves a sequence of purposeful actions, suchas making a toy or playing a game with rules. Such play is a way ofengaging with peers that is beneficial for cognitive development,Gauvain said. She and Munroe found that exposure to open-fire cooking, as opposedto cooking on kerosene stoves, was associated with both lowercognitive performance and less frequent structured play, regardlessof culture, child age and educational level, and socioeconomicstatus. Because their study was not experimental they cannot determine thatsmoke from open-fire cooking causes lower cognitive performance, the researchers said. However, theresearchers point out that their results echo the findings of a2008 study that found direct connections among toxins in the air,brain development and cognitive impairment. That study compared MRIscans of 9- and 10-year-old middle-class children living in MexicoCity, where there are high levels of air pollution, andPolotitlán, a city in Mexico with low air-pollution levels. Gauvain and Munroe said the fact that the negative effects ofopen-fire cooking were strongest for the youngest children, whospent more time in the home where the cooking took place,"suggests that these deleterious effects may subside as thebrain matures or as children spend less time in the presence ofopen-fire cooking." The question, Gauvain said, is if there is a cognitive deficit andall children suffer some exposure, "What are the long-rangeimplications for the community? … If there is damage, canswitching to non-wood-burning stoves be beneficial? Developing safecooking methods is important. Exposure to wood-burning stoves maybe more damaging than people realize. It could have cognitive andbehavioral effects. We're trying to draw attention to the fact thatthe problem may be much broader in scope.". The e-commerce company in China offers quality products such as China Empire Line Wedding Dresses , Plus Size Designer Wedding Gowns Manufacturer, and more. For more , please visit Quinceanera Party Dresses today!
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