The pollution from cosy fires could raise your risk of dementia

Cooking a roast and making toast have just been identified as sources of air pollution, so we have now been advised to use extractor fans and leave windows open. But in many homes there is another potent source of air pollution: a wood-burning stove.

The stoves have become especially trendy in cities and towns — at least one home in six has one in South-East England. More than 1.5 million stoves are owned across the UK, with 200,000 more being sold every year, often marketed as a ‘green’ way to heat homes.

In fact, though, they create lethal pollution. An editorial in The BMJ last year warned that even modern stoves carrying government-approved ‘eco-friendly’ labels emit pollution at the same rate as 25 ten-year-old diesel lorries.

Danger? More than 1.5 million stoves are owned across the UK, with 200,000 more being sold every year, often marketed as a ‘green’ way to heat homes

Danger? More than 1.5 million stoves are owned across the UK, with 200,000 more being sold every year, often marketed as a ‘green’ way to heat homes

Dr Gary Fuller, who runs King’s College London’s Air Quality Network, has reported how UK air research has detected high levels of the sugar levoglucosan, a by-product of burning wood, on weekends and evenings in winter.

Worse still are open fires. Air quality investigators at King’s College London found that more than two thirds of households that burn wood do so on such fires, even though this is banned in smoke-control areas created under the Clean Air Acts in UK cities including London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Birmingham. The fine is up to £1,000 for burning wood in a grate, but enforcement is non-existent.

However wood is burned, the pollution it emits is the most dangerous kind — minute particles labelled PM2.5 (as they measure 2.5 micro metres or less — under one 30th of the width of a human hair).

These particles are too tiny to be filtered out by our nose and lungs, which can deal with larger particles such as pollen. Instead, studies have shown how PM2.5 particulates can enter the bloodstream, where they can cause serious illnesses including heart disease and dementia.

According to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), about 38 per cent of UK particulate matter emissions come from burning wood and coal in domestic open fires and solid-fuel stoves, compared with 12 per cent for road transport.

A study by King’s College London last year found that wood-burning accounts for up to 31 per cent of PM2.5 produced in London.

Last month, acknowledging that domestic stoves and open fires are ‘the single biggest source of particulate matter emissions’, the Government announced measures to ‘clean up our air and save lives’.

Fact: Last year, the BMJ warned that even modern stoves carrying government-approved ‘eco-friendly’ labels emit pollution at the same rate as 25 ten-year-old diesel lorries

Fact: Last year, the BMJ warned that even modern stoves carrying government-approved ‘eco-friendly’ labels emit pollution at the same rate as 25 ten-year-old diesel lorries

From 2022 only the ‘cleanest stoves’ will be available, and legislation will be introduced to prohibit the sale of the ‘most polluting’ fuels. Councils will be given ‘enhanced powers to increase the rate of upgrade of inefficient and polluting heating appliances’.

Last year, a team of cardiologists at the University of Padua in Italy studied medical data stored in the implanted defibrillators — devices that monitor and help to control abnormal heart rhythms — worn by more than 280 patients living in the Veneto region.

The team reported in the journal Lancet Planetary Health that, over nearly two years, the higher the levels of PM2.5, the higher the incidence of dangerous heart problems such as tachycardia (excessively rapid beating) and atrial fibrillation (irregular beats) patients experienced.

PM2.5 may cause heart disease both by damaging cardiovascular cells and by making blood more likely to clot, according to a 2012 Danish study which exposed human endothelial cells (which line the interior of blood vessels) to particulate matter from wood smoke and diesel fumes.

The scientists from Copenhagen University found that particulates from wood smoke induced much higher levels of damaging inflammation to these cells than diesel particulates. Woodsmoke particulates also made the cells much more likely to adhere to white blood cells — which can cause plaques that form lethal clots.

Investigators have already shown that cutting wood-particulate pollution can save lives from heart disease.

Three years ago, pollution experts at the Air Monitoring Board in Sacramento City examined the

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