Oct 13, 2011 – WASHINGTON
Primitive cooking stoves are used throughout half the world and kill more people per year — about two million — than malaria, said a study published in the United States on Thursday.
Three billion people worldwide cook indoors by burning solid fuels such as wood, charcoal or
dung, yet little public awareness surrounds what the World Health Organization describes as the globe’s top environmental killer.
The smoke that pours from these unvented fires fills indoor spaces and causes pneumonia and chronic lung disease that particularly affects women and children who tend to spend more time in the home while men are outside working.
“Many people in developed countries don’t realize that smoke from indoor cooking fires is a terrible scourge upon the health of a large number of people,” said co-author Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
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The recently-formed 
1.9 million people (mostly women and children) die annually in the developing world from illnesses brought on by breathing toxic smoke from indoor cooking stoves. 
