Indoor Air Pollution

Fredericksburg, Virginia - A team of seven UMW students and their professor recently spent a week in Honduras conducting extensive interviews with more than 50 families suffering from indoor air pollution from wood-burning stoves--the fourth-leading cause of death for children under 5 in developing countries. Indoor air pollution has similar affects as smoking during pregnancy; it's as if children are smokers at birth.

Next up for the students: raising enough money to provide every home in the Honduran refugee village of Siete de Abril with improved cookstoves. The group also plans to establish a program for monitoring air quality in the homes after the new stoves are installed.  read more »

The college world is a uniquely preparatory environment that rarely affords students the opportunity to apply their work in the classroom to real world change. Of course, this is a principal divide that SHH is consistently working to bridge. This Fall, the University of Mary Washington and SHH have partnered to create an independent study course in Economics called Doing Development. The class, which includes seven students taught by Dr. Shawn Humphrey, is focusing upon the problem of indoor-air-pollution, which the World Health Organization identifies as the cause of premature death for nearly 2.5 million people annually. For those individuals at Siete de Abril who are reliant on wood-burning cooking mechanisms, indoor-air-pollution may be linked to lung cancer, emphysema, and asthma.  read more »