Doctors and Public Health Associations Warn Against Cooking with Gas

The public health community has always been way ahead of the government regarding issuing the best health guidance and advocating for consumer protections. 

Take smoking for example. Public health scientists had to produce more than 7,000 studies showing the links between smoking and lung cancer and bronchitis in the 1940s and '50s before the Surgeon General acknowledged the link in the '60s. Public health progress on cigarettes was stymied for years by “studies” funded by the tobacco industry set up to claim that smoking was actually good for your health. This reprehensible strategy to obscure the truth at the expense of people’s lungs is still in use today by the fossil fuel industry. (This is why the gas industry describes its product as “natural” and “clean,” despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.) 

Luckily, doctors care about their patients and see the real-world consequences being obscured by the industry's disinformation. They are taking action and helping to spread the word. 

In 2022, the American Medical Association instructed its members to inform their patients about the health dangers of gas stove pollution. This means that when doctors have a patient suffering from childhood asthma, for example, and they discuss what may trigger attacks or exacerbate asthma symptoms, they can talk about whether the family has a gas stove in the house. It gives doctors one more tool to help patients feel better. 

Similarly, the American Public Health Association has identified gas stove pollution as a public health concern and developed a set of recommendations covering public policy, exposure reduction, and public education to help policymakers advance measures that will improve public health, and help the public and patients protect themselves from needless gas pollution exposure in their own homes.