Household energy and health: where next for research and practice?

Cooking and home heating with coal and biomass fuels (wood, crop residues, animal dung, and charcoal) are ideal subjects for well intentioned epidemiology. Cooking and heating with such fuels generate large amounts of pollutants that can harm people's health throughout the lifecourse, a risk that largely affects poor communities. In a simple world, epidemiology would investigate the hazardous effects and test the benefits of any interventions, and rational individuals and policy bodies would use this information to initiate positive change.