Achievement

Trainee Jill Baumgartner has finished collecting data for her dissertation exploring the relationship between indoor air pollution from biomass combustion on blood pressure among adult women and children in rural Yunnan, China. She enrolled 280 adult women and 240 children into her study and collected measurements on personal air pollution (PM2.5) exposure, blood pressure, salt intake, fuel use and energy use patterns and physical activity. Her results indicated that a one log unit increase in PM2.5 exposure results in a highly significant 2.4 mmHg increase in systolic blood pressure (SBP) among adult women. This suggests that cardiovascular disease may be an additional component of the public health burden of indoor air pollution. Prioritizing issues of energy and indoor air pollution may be a crucial policy imperative for China and other developing countries as they move forward in trying to reduce their cardiovascular disease burden.