Study on Indoor Air Pollutants: Toxicity Screening of Suspended Particulate Matter

• Published in: Bulletin of environmental contamination and toxicology Vol. 67; no. 1; pp. 149 - 154
• Main Authors: Ghosh, S K, Patel, T S, Doctor, P B, Kulkarni, P K, Shah, SH, Desai, N M, Derasari, A
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.07.2001
• ISSN: 0007-4861
• DOI: 10.1007/s00128-001-0103-1

Biomass fuel such as wood which is the intrinsic source of sulphur and other trace metals, still remains a major source of domestic energy for the urban poor and rural populations in the developing countries. (Dary et al. 1981, Hex 1986, Aggarwal et al. 1982). It is one of the major sources of indoor air pollutants (Behera, 1995), the others being building material, the ground under the building and the biological agents. It is also reported that half of the world's households cook their food on the unprocessed solid fuels that release at least 50 liters or more air pollutants than the cooking gas (Cooke et al 1982) when they are used in chulas (native stoves) for cooking because the fuels are incompletely burned. Due to this incomplete combustion of biomass, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, suspended particulate matter (SPM) etc. are produced. When this polluted air is inhaled, there is obviously an impact on the health, causing respiratory morbidity like cough, expectoration, dyspnoea, abnormal lung function, etc. Thus it serves as one of the potential health risk factor, especially among housewives and growing children (Smith 1987). To minimise such exposure risk as well as to have better energy efficiency, improved 'chulhas' were introduced. This study was aimed at to assess the impact of improved chulhas on indoor air quality in comparison to traditional chulhas. While SO sub(2), NOx and HCHO were measured chemically, toxicity of SPM was determined in bacterial tests systems (Ghosh et al. 1997) using three microbial test systems namely Microtox (Bulich and Isenberg, 1980), the Motility test (Dutka, 1980) and the Growth zone inhibition test (Liu et al. 1989).