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Comment by ruste | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to put together two points that people have raised in this thread:

  1) Asthma is strongly correlated with gas heating and stove use.
  2) Gas heating and stove use is strongly correlated with latitude.

This is a case of correlation not being causation. One of the primary predictors of asthma is colder winters/latitude [2]. It doesn't look like the study controls for this in any way [1].

  [1] https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/42/6/1724/737113
  [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3072993/

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There isn't just one study, but rather, a growing body of evidence. This would be evident if you had actually read the meta-analysis that you cited - it includes 41 individual studies, many of which are single-city studies that arrived at the same conclusion.

More broadly, the Quartz article quotes experts who cite 4 decades of research about the the dangers of gas stoves.

The meta-analysis is based on NO levels in the home, not stove use. Primarily this relates to gas heating. I'm aware of what it says. I'm not sure how what you're saying relates to my points. It looks to me like this article is saying "Here's good research showing that NO is linked to a 40% higher rate of asthma. Stoves produce NO so they must cause a 40% higher rate of asthma." without a study connecting the two directly. And all of this based on a meta-analysis that doesn't attempt to control for a primary trigger of asthma.

Don't you understand? The manufacturing of new electric stoves to replace the billions of gas stoves currently in use will be good for the environment. Stop drawing attention to flaws in the article. /s

Your study [2] doesn’t control for gas stove use and draws its conclusions from outdoor air pollution measurements. Indoor air measurements aren’t available.

It’s possible (and indeed likely, from the studies linked in this thread and article) that cold weather contributes both to gas usage and asthma, and gas usage contributes to asthma on its own.

I can of course only offer anecdata, but my SO's asthma disappears during spring/summer, to return when the cold sets in. Gas usage inside the house is constant, since the central heating boiler is outside. Now, it might not be temperature or humidity, but it isn't the result of burning more gas.

Do you use a gas stove? I think this points to the multi-factor aspect of asthma. There's also the fact that asthma is triggered by many things -- dust in the ventilation that only gets circulated in the winter when the heat gets turned on, for example.

As an aside -- it's important to keep in mind that the article does not say "gas stoves cause asthma, rip them from your homes immediately or be prepared to curse your infant with respiratory illness." It says, "there's a link here, and we should do something about that link." The author goes to great pains to use words other than cause: "connection" "link" etc.

Sure, but others were pointing at heating as a source, and in my SO's case, that does not seem likely. However, the use of the gas stove is constant throughout the year, so it is probably more complex. An induction stove is planned for early next year, so I might be able to observe differences.

> The author goes to great pains to use words other than cause: "connection" "link" etc.

From the article:

> The cumulative evidence was enough for the venerable New England Journal of Medicine to publish an editorial in January recommending that “new gas appliances be removed from the market.” It was co-authored by Howard Frumkin, a former director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, which is responsible for investigating environmental drivers of illness and promulgating guidance about those risk factors.

It's purely a regression on latitude, temperature, and asthma prevalence by age group. I'm not suggesting that cold weather contributes to gas usage. Gas stoves / heat are more common the further north you get.

Isn't the study about Australia though? Most of that population lives in a relatively narrow band of latitude...

Uhm, I am somewhat of a pyro.. I LOVE fires. I burn a crap-ton of wood... I have literally no allergies nor asthma, breathing problems - I have a gas stove and a gas heater in my house...

I will burn a bitch at any chance I get! I literally broke my brick hearth last week chopping wood.

I was one grounded for a week when my dad came home (general contractor) and I was staying home from school with the flu, fever, and I was pumping wood into that wood-burning stove like I was trying to drive a train... it was like 110 degrees in the house.... my dad was furious,

Now, I have an endless supply of wood and a really nice fireplace - ive been going NUTs burning everything I can!

Same. I've been slack this year but have about 15 cords sitting out back waiting to be split (half of was standing dead so it's good to go).

I know heat is heat but for some reason wood-stove heat seems like it just works better on the human body. Ours is in the basement, so it's 95 down there and that heats the entire floor upstairs.

Where do you live? I want some!!

---

I grew up in Lake Tahoe. and in 1982 - there was the biggest winter in over 100 years - we had 30 feet of snow, and no power - and we cooked all our food on the wood burning stove.

I had deliver care packages to the various tourists who got stuck in their houses due to the snow - and we would have people come to our house to bath because we had hot water....

I recall making popcorn each night on the stove...

Wood burning stoves are the best!

Although I was only a child at the time wood stoves were being phased out in the Tahoe basin (sometime in the mid/late 90s?), I definitely felt torn between the "rustic / cabin" feeling of the ordeal and the better air quality of having them phased out. It was never so bad in the neighborhood I was in because it was mostly rich folks who came up for xmas and maybe once in the summer, but xmas was so smokey! It was even worse in areas that have some inversion layer / valley geography to hold in the smoke down close to the ground; the valleys leading up to Squaw and Alpine could get "hotboxed" with pine-flavored smoke at times!

edit: I'd take that pine smoke over the general "Essence de Diesel" that pervades the current European city I live in!

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