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IGERT Trainee Focuses on the Effects of Pollution from Cooking on Public Health
Achievement/Results
R.J. Briggs, a doctoral candidate in Economics, is funded through the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program in Indoor Environmental Science and Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin (UT), and is studying the effects of cooking and related pollutant emissions on the health of home occupants. His approach to doing so is novel and involves interdisciplinary collaborations with two IGERT faculty participants, Richard Corsi (Environmental Engineering) and Jeffrey Siegel (Architectural Engineering), as well as several physical scientists and engineers that Briggs worked with during a three-month internship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
While the effects of outdoor air pollution on public health have received attention for several decades, relatively few studies have examined the health consequences of indoor air pollutants in the United States. Yet, this issue has direct relevance for the estimation of the effects of outdoor air quality: if people respond to high outdoor pollution levels by spending more time indoors, the measured health effects of outdoor air pollution may be confounded by the effects of indoor air pollutants. After environmental tobacco smoke, cooking emissions pollute indoor air more than any other single source. Brigg’s IGERT-funded research explores the relationship between respiratory health and air pollution generated primarily from cooking activities in U.S. homes.
Cooking generates fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and, in the case of gas stoves, nitrogen dioxide (NO2). To analyze the effect of cooking emissions, Briggs has used objective measures of respiratory health – spirometry – from two nationally representative cross sections of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) III. The NHANES database provides a wealth of information on individual factors that affect respiratory function. Data from NHANES were augmented with county-level statistics on outdoor air pollution from the USEPA’s AirData database. While direct measures of exposure to cooking emissions are not available for individuals in the data, the concentration of pollutants from these emissions will depend on the use of proper kitchen ventilation, stove fuel type, home characteristics, time spent cooking, the quantity and type of food cooked, and the cooking method. Using NHANES data, Briggs analyzed a set of physical models of indoor air quality as a function of available information on these variables, accounting for the individual choice to use ventilation. In a set of supplemental analyses, he controlled for time spent cooking by using imputed values derived from the American Time Use Survey. He also accounted for variations in the adoption of kitchen ventilation requirements in state and local building codes.
Briggs uses nationally-representative health data to analyze the effects of indoor air pollution in a structural model that respects both the physical theory of indoor environments and the economic theory of individual choice. While some previous papers do make use of nationally representative data, the reduced form approach they take does not account for outdoor air quality, differences between homes, and ventilation choices, all of which are accounted for by Briggs. On the other hand, some studies with smaller samples explicitly capture indoor concentrations of pollutants, but the data in these studies lack the depth and statistical power of the NHANES database employed by Briggs.
Briggs’ research is entirely funded through our NSF IGERT program, which has fostered a framework for very important interdisciplinary collaboration that would likely not have existed otherwise.
Address Goals
R.J. Briggs’ NSF-funded research is novel and is the first to combine fundamental concepts related to indoor air quality with economic theories. This type of framework to address an important indoor air quality problem is made possible by the interdisciplinary nature of our NSF IGERT program. The combination of economists, engineers, and physical scientists at UT and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has allowed new discoveries, and researchers who have learned a great deal from one another (learning).
