Health risk assessment among biogas and conventional cooking fuel users in different socioeconomic conditions of rural West Bengal

Abstract

In many rural areas of developing countries, solid fuel use is still very common. The present study aims to investigate the Household Air Pollution (HAP) exposure effect from traditional biomass fuels and biogas on the health of rural women. The results revealed that nearly 93% of rural families utilize conventional fuels for daily cooking and heating purposes, whereas clean fuels like biogas users were very limited. However, high-income, educated, elderly, well-structured houses (Pucca), and hierarchically more advanced families were observed to cook with biogas fuel. Further, the present study also used spatial HAP mapping and land use mapping model to analyze exposure load pattern and sources of solid fuels availability, respectively. The clean fuel biogas burning showed the lowest HAP concentration compared to traditional fuels except for NO₂ (1.14 ± 0.05 ppm) that also represents in case of health risk estimation. The biogas users also observed the lowest COHb% (0.008 ± 0.01) than conventional fuels. The health risks associated with SO₂ and NO₂ for biogas users were revealed lowest in both acute and chronic instances. Monte-Carlo probabilistic model observed that coal cake may pose high health risks among traditional fuels when concerning PM_2.5, SO₂, and NO₂, but in the case of COHb %, cow dung users showed the highest health risk (0.39 ± 0.02). These findings have significant implications for public health, suggesting that promoting the use of cleaner cooking fuels, particularly biogas, could lead to substantial health benefits for rural populations. This finding also indicates that government intervention should be required to enhance the utilization of cleaner cooking fuels in rural India for women's safety.