The project I am working on is investigating indoor air pollution (iap) and its effects on neonatal mortality. Iap comes mostly from cooking and heating fuel. In low-resource areas of the world most households use solid fuels (things like straw, animal dung, agricultural residues, coal, etc.) to cook with and heat their homes, causing a lot of pollution compared to using gas or electricity. On top of that, many homes don’t have great (or any) ventilation and may not have a separate room for cooking. Other studies have already linked iap from solid fuels to poor health outcomes including lung cancer, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and more. We’re looking at neonatal mortality because women, who are responsible for most domestic responsibilities, and young children, who generally stay with their mothers, spend the most time inside and so they are at greater risk. The group that I'm working with did a research paper on this topic looking at data from India and now I'll be expanding what they did to include other countries as well.
I’m really excited about my practicum, the people I am working with are very intelligent and have a lot of experience so I know I'll learn a lot. Hopefully what we find out will add to the knowledge base already out there on the topic and help to inform programs and policies that aim to lower the high neonatal mortality rates in developing regions. And if not then at the very least I'll be a whole lot better at using Stata (a statistical software package I'm using to analyze the data), somehow this just doesn't have the same ring to it though..
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