Eric McCollum, director of the The New England Journal of Medicine . The research for this publication is important because household air pollution from biomass fuels during cooking is a major risk factor for severe infant pneumonia in middle income and low income countries. This large trial was conducted in India, Peru, Guatemala and Rwanda, with participation of 3,200 women who were pregnant.
Hi, my name is Doctor Eric mccollum and I'm the director of the Global Program in pediatric respiratory Sciences at Johns Hopkins and uh an associate professor in pediatric pulmonology. Our publication in the New England Journal of medicine uh from the household air pollution intervention network or happen is an international multi center randomized control trial. Assessing the impact of a liquefied petroleum gas and fuel uh intervention, cook stove intervention uh introduced during pregnancy on severe pneumonia among infants up to one year of age as compared to control participants who continued to cook with traditional biomass cook stoves and this was conducted in low and middle income countries. Uh The happen trial is important for three main reasons. Um first of all household air pollution um from uh biomass fuels uh during cooking like wood, charcoal, animal dung and coal is an important risk factor uh for severe infant pneumonia in low and middle income countries. Pneumonia is the leading infectious cause of death among Children in low and middle income countries responsible responsible for about 800,000 deaths per year. Yet to date. No cleaner cook stove intervention in low and middle income countries has demonstrated any impact on reducing severe infant pneumonia or pneumonia among Children in, in low and middle income countries. Two happen was a large rigorously conducted trial in four representative low and middle income countries, India, Peru, Guatemala and Rwanda across four continents. With 3200 pregnant women participating. And three, the trial's LP G cook stove and fuel intervention was highly successful at reducing household air pollutant exposure to fine particulate matter by about 60% compared to standard biomass cook stoves used by control participants. But despite this large uh large exposure reduction, we still did not find any evidence of uh the cook stove intervention, reducing severe infant pneumonia among our participants in these settings. We want to thank all of the participants uh across the four low and middle income countries for participating in the trial. And we wanna sincerely thank um all of the other coin investigators of the trial, especially those uh based in the four low and middle income countries for their huge contributions to this trial. Thank you.
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