Campus Digest:
Fall 2021
News and happenings from around Boston College.Ěý
Illustration: Andrea D’Aquino
RESEARCH
How Social Networks Influence Public Health
Group dynamics may help encourage the adoption of cleaner cooking fuel in India and beyond.
Fall 2021
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A pioneering study led by Boston College researchers has found that personal networks in India could play a pivotal role in the adoption of cleaner cooking fuel, which would represent a significant step toward improving global public health.
“This is the first report to show that just like with tobacco use, obesity, or physical activity—where our networks play a role in shaping our behaviors and decisions—personal networks are also associated with what kinds of stoves rural poor use,” said Ď㽶Đă Assistant Professor of Social Work Praveen Kumar, coauthor of the new report, which was published in Environmental Research Letters.
In rural India, particularly among those living in poverty, people rely widely on solid fuels such as firewood, charcoal, animal dung, and crop residue for cooking. It has been estimated that household air pollution, to which indoor cooking contributes, accounted for roughly 600,000 premature deaths in India in 2019, making it a leading cause of preventable deaths in the nation of 1.4 billion residents. That’s why health officials have worked for decades to try to shift people to cleaner fuel sources, such as liquefied petroleum gas. But progress has been slow, due to economic, educational, and demographic barriers.
For the recent study, researchers queried 198 respondents from roughly thirty villages in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. They found that the more peers and friends a respondent has who use cleaner cooking technology, the more likely the respondent is to also use cleaner cooking technology—and vice versa, Kumar said.
The study’s coauthors include Boston College School of Social Work Dean Gautam Yadama, as well as researchers from Harvard Medical School, Ohio State University, Chile’s Universidad Mayor, and Washington University, St. Louis. Their findings have implications for policymakers seeking ways to continue to convince poor households to shift to cleaner cooking fuels. “If personal networks are so important,” Kumar said, “there is a need to find residents who are influencers or opinion leaders and build targeted awareness campaigns involving them.”
Subsequent research should explore the threshold of personal networks with cleaner stoves that could shift households to cleaner cooking, Kumar said. “The transition from traditional cooking to clean cooking is critically important—not just in India,” he said. “This is a global public health problem.”Ěý
More from the Lab
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COVID-19 and mental health
Ď㽶Đă developmental psychologist Rebekah Levine Coley and economist Christopher F. Baum found that reports of anxiety and depression in 2020 were more than six times higher than in 2019, confirming anecdotal evidence that the spread of the coronavirus has strained Americans’ mental health. Furthermore, they discovered that these increases were borne primarily by younger adults, according to a new study out in Translational Behavioral Medicine.
Ěý Photo: Shutterstock
Greener meat
A team led by inaugural Engineering Department Chair Glenn Gaudette has used spinach leaves as scaffolding to grow meat cells. “Cellular agriculture has the potential to produce meat that replicates the structure of traditionally grown meat while minimizing the land and water requirements,” said Gaudette, who has also seized on spinach’s veiny structure to cultivate human heart tissue.
Oral cancer risk
Exposure to secondhand smoke could increase a person’s risk of developing oral cancer by 51 percent, according to a new meta-analysis in Tobacco Control coauthored by Ď㽶Đă Global Observatory on Pollution and Health Codirector Kurt Straif. “This should be another incentive for additional states to ratify the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control,” Straif said, “and for those who have already ratified to increase their efforts against the tobacco industry.”
