Abstract
Worldwide, more than 3 billion people rely on solid fuels for indoor cooking and lighting households, resulting in critically high exposure to household air pollution (HAP), and more specifically to fine particulate matter (PM2.5). In South Africa, more than 40% of the rural population still uses solid fuels for indoor cooking with women and children being particularly at risk. PM2.5 penetrates deeply into the lung and enters the bloodstream, contributing to systemic inflammation and oxidative stress, which could inhibit the immune response to vaccines. Therefore, exposure to elevated concentrations of HAP may adversely affect on the immune response to vaccines. The objectives of my doctoral thesis are thus to characterize the levels, sources, and determinants of exposure to HAP in rural South African children and to determine whether exposure to HAP is associated with altered immune response to vaccines between ages 6.5 and 8 years. We will present the Venda Health Examination of Mothers, Babies and their Environment (VHEMBE), the birth cohort I will use to realize this project. We will also report the anticipated findings and impacts of this project. This will be the first study to investigate the potential adverse effects of household air pollution on children's immune response to vaccines anywhere in the world. In Sub-Saharan Africa, infectious diseases account for almost half of the disease burden among children and thus, the findings from our study are anticipated to have major repercussions for these vulnerable populations.
