[SPEAKER_15]: are mostly at risk for that. So there's some historical context. Many black and brown communities have been subject to residential segregation. This is not news to you, but I just wanted you to get a chance to read it, which propelled to the reduction of resources and improper infrastructure. So when we look at the numbers, black children are more than twice likely to have asthma. Black children are 7.6 times more likely to die from asthma. And in 2021, 72 million people of color live in areas of high level of ozone and or particle pollution. So when we make the connection between why we're holding the series and the effect of climate change and also the work that we do in the city of Method, our Office of Prevention and also the Office of Planning, Development and Sustainability. I always have to remember what PDS stands for. So from floods to heat waves, black and brown children are at greater risk of climate-related health outcomes. And we also have the Health Equity Council in this unit, which is Brenda Pike, our climate planner, is leading that team with our Medford Connectors, Charbel, Lizette, Samia, who's not here, and Natasha, who is virtual. So the Climate Equity is an ad hoc committee that will advise the city on the implementation of the Climate Action Plan with a focus on representing the interests of previously underrepresented groups in the city of Method. So how can you help? Learn about environmental justice issues, get involved and stay engaged. You can stay engaged. We have this pull-up banner and with a QR code, you can stay engaged with that or reach out to either myself or Brenda and just connect with us at City Hall. And that's it. So I will Dr. Britta Lundberg is on her way. She is traffic is terrible. She's running behind so but she will be our speaker tonight and she'll go more in depth with on the effect of asthma on children. So I will I'm just asking for a little patience.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure. Yeah. OK. So while we have some time, one of the things if you if you come over to our to our little demonstration area over there later, we have a portable induction cooktop there, which is an electric cooktop. And one of the great things about that, in addition to the benefits with asthma, is that it doesn't heat up the The stove top and the area around it as much it just focuses the heat on the pan itself so it's there's a it makes a electromagnetic field it So if you have a metal pan that a magnet will attach to it will work on that and it just heats up the pot So I can I'll show you later I can turn it on, put my hand on it, it won't burn my hand because it will only heat up metal. I can put a towel down and put the pot on top of the towel and cook through the towel and it won't burn the towel because it's just focusing the heat on the pan. So it's incredibly energy efficient, it saves you energy, it saves you money, and it reduces the risk of fire. And it improves asthma outcomes as well. So it's a great benefit. The full-size units, like the regular cook stoves, are more expensive than a traditional stove is. This portable cooktop here, it's $100. It's relatively simple. And I cooked on one for the majority of my cooking for a year. And it was really great. If you want to try it out for yourself, the Medford Public Library has two induction cooktops, portable ones like that, that you can check out of the library to try it for a couple of weeks and see if it's something that you are interested in.
[SPEAKER_10]: So there's coffee and some finger foods, if folks are interested.
[SPEAKER_07]: But I think while we wait, we can tell. Good, how are you? Hello. Okay, so they can see this, they can't see that.
[SPEAKER_09]: Hi, how are you? Really good. Good, I'm Kevin from Equity Community Media, helping with all that.
[SPEAKER_13]: Okay, fantastic. We got your microphone here.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me run to the back and get reset. And did Lisa mention the handheld mic so the audience is back there too? Yes, okay, good.
[SPEAKER_09]: As I said, it was half an hour when I looked this morning. And I was like, I know it'll be a little busier. It may be 40 minutes. And I kept trying to be very smart about it. And just every time, then I was like, at least it took it to be a couple of minutes.
[SPEAKER_07]: It didn't go very fast. I'm so happy to see people come out. We have some stuff on opening night.
[SPEAKER_04]: and she would hang out with him every summer.
[SPEAKER_15]: All right, so we're back. I just wanted to introduce Dr. Lundberg, who will be our speaker for this evening. She is a trained infectious disease physician and former assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Emory University. She is the CEO and founder of the Health Equity Institute and Lundberg Health Advocates, which is a patient advocacy group. The Health Equity Institute offers advocacy education and funding for program advocacy services for patients in need. Dr. Lundberg is an active member of Climate Code Blue, a physician led advocacy group dedicated to increasing public awareness of the health effects of climate change. She is a former chair of the board and active member of the Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility and a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society's Environmental and Occupational Health Committee. I will pass on the mic to Dr. Lundberg.
[SPEAKER_09]: Sophie, how do I change the slides? I can change it for you. Oh, I can just say next slide. First of all, thank you all so much for coming out on a Wednesday night to hear about air pollution and climate justice and the health impacts of childhood asthma in black children, because I think this is such an incredibly important topic, and I am so glad to be here. Next slide. So just a few words about what is asthma. And I'm sorry, these slides are kind of far back, but I think you can see them OK. So it essentially is a hyper-reactivity of the airways that causes swelling, difficulty breathing. I'm sure that many of you in this room, I as a parent and the parent of two kids with asthma, I'm sure a lot of you are involuntary experts about asthma. And so I probably don't need to tell you too much. But what I do need to tell you is that there are several triggers for asthma. There are triggers that we can do things about, and there are triggers we can't do things about. The triggers we generally can't do so much about include cold air, exercise, viral infections, you know, that your kids are going to be exposed to or that you are exposed to. But tonight I'm going to talk about the things we can do things, something about. And I'm going to talk about who this disease is most common in. So it turns out, and actually it was really a pleasure to me to prepare and a bit of a shock, I have to say, to prepare this talk because it was somewhat of an eye-opener to me. I did not know all of these statistics, so I'm just going to share with you some pretty sobering statistics that I wasn't aware of. So as many of you know, black children have a higher risk of developing asthma than children of other racial groups. Black children have more than double the asthma rate, 12% versus 5.5% in other groups. Emergency use is much higher. And there's an increased asthma fatality rate. Now, these data are for across the country. They're not for Massachusetts. Massachusetts, it's a little lower. But in general, the asthma fatality rate is almost eight times higher in black children. Next slide. So that list of triggers that I put up there in the slide before this mentioned a whole bunch of triggers, mold, allergens, pollen, as I said, exercise and whatnot. And it mentioned smoke, but it doesn't mention what we're gonna talk about tonight, which is air pollution. I really feel like the NIH should list air pollution as a trigger and cause of asthma because the data tell us that it is. Air pollution in Massachusetts, according to a 2019 study by Boston College professor Dr. Philip Landrigan, showed that 15,000 cases of asthma in 2019 are due to air pollution in our state, and they're disproportionately affecting communities of color. But air pollution isn't just a cause and a trigger of asthma. It's a cause of a lot of other stuff. It's a cause of IQ loss in children. It's a cause of low birth weight among newborns. And, importantly, it's a cause of death. Worldwide, it accounts for 3 million deaths. It's the fifth leading risk factor for death in the world. And in our state, it accounts for 2,800 deaths a year, at least in this 2019 study. The important thing to note is that those deaths occur in every single community in Massachusetts, regardless of income, regardless of race, but they disproportionately occur among communities of color. And so, and the other important thing about that study is that it turns out that the level of particulate matter that the EPA believes is protective turned out not to be protective in that study. The levels that they saw health effects at were much, much lower, leading the authors to recommend much, much lower levels of pollution that should be allowed. Now if I just asked you what the number one trigger is in terms of houses about what the trigger for childhood asthma is, I put it on the slide, I should have asked the slide before, but actually the number one trigger for pediatric asthma is gas stove use in the house. And so that is what I'm gonna focus my talk on, but I thought I'd mention outdoor air pollution right at the get-go also. Next slide, please. Again, just reinforcing what I just said, there are disparities around who's exposed to air pollution. On average, nationally, people of color are exposed to 38% higher levels of the air pollutant nitrogen dioxide. It's just a common air pollution pollutant. And we in the Northeast, ironically, you know, we... I grew up thinking, oh, we're so much more enlightened. No, no, no, not when it comes to air pollution. Actually, the disparities in the Northeast are some of the worst in the country. And one of the top 10 cities in terms of those disparities is Boston. And one of the two top 10 states in terms of locating sources of air pollution including things like hazardous waste facilities and biomass incinerators and natural gas infrastructure like compressor stations and oil and gas pipelines and that kind of thing. There are two top states in the country for that. One is Wisconsin and one is Massachusetts. So that's distressing. Next slide please. So it's important to talk about childhood asthma, because there are three really important reasons why children are more susceptible to air pollution provoked asthma. First of all, they breathe at a higher rate, so they take those pollutants in at a higher rate. Second, because they're smaller, they have a higher lung to body weight surface area, and so they absorb more of those pollutants. And second, they have very immature developing respiratory systems, and so they're just not equipped to handle that level of pollution. I was asked to speak about the interaction between climate justice and asthma, and in fact, there's a very powerful interaction. Climate change, whether caused by wildfire smoke, as you see on the left, or flooding, bottom right, or drought, any of the commonly occurring things with climate change, all increase the respiratory disease and they compound racial disparities. The driver of climate change is fossil fuels and oil, gas, coal, infrastructure that produces all of this air pollution that then is a driver of climate change. And the interesting thing is that the fossil fuels don't just cause the climate change, they also are a direct provoker of asthma themselves. Next slide. Now the great news here is that cutting air pollution has immediate effects. I mean, really almost immediate. So we see asthma rates, heart attack rates, they fall rapidly. Babies are born healthier. Next slide. And how do we know that? So this is just a bunch of studies showing this effect. I'm just going to focus on the second one down. You might remember at the Atlanta Olympics, they really limited driving and transportation And they made all of the local, anyone who produced any local sources of air pollution, to really ramp it down so that the air quality would be better for the Olympics. And a bunch of physicians thought, well, this is interesting. Why don't we look at asthma at the same time? With all of this air pollution falling, we would expect it to get better. It plummeted. And that within weeks. So within 17 days, they had decreased emergency room visits for childhood asthma, decreased hospitalizations. And it wasn't just the Atlanta Olympics. They saw the same thing for the Beijing Olympics, because China did the same thing. And they really got very, very strict about their air pollution standards. And they actually looked at some of the data in lung tissue, and they saw decreased inflammatory markers. and decreased incidence of asthma exacerbations and inflammation. And so seeing all that data, we can just finish up and go home, right? Because we've got all the answers here. The answer is to decrease air pollution. Well, unfortunately, it's not that easy. Next slide, please. This is an article that I wrote in collaboration. They left off my co-author, Dr. Adrian Allen, who is Awesome, and they, anyway, I have to bother them about this, because I just noticed this when I pulled up the article. They've rebranded as Commonwealth Beacons, so when they were Commonwealth, she was on there, and now she's not. But it's just an article about pollution inequality in the state of Massachusetts, and all the roadblocks that we have been running into in terms of communities of color being disproportionately impacted by locating polluting infrastructure in them, like the Peabody Peeker plant, right in a community that's a disalready overburdened by too much polluting infrastructure, the Weymouth Compressor Station. Two success stories that I should mention since Governor Healey came into office are the Long Meadow Pipeline that the DEP put the kibosh on, and a biomass incinerator in Springfield. So we've had some victories, but by and large, Regulating outdoor air pollution is a real challenge. So that is why I'm going to focus on indoor air pollution. Next slide. Because this is something we as individuals can do something about. Next slide. Now, you might not know this, but indoor air quality is often much, much worse than outdoor air quality. And that is an important thing to think about because we spend up to 90% of our time indoors, right? That said, the EPA has said that indoor air pollution can be anywhere from two to five to 100 times worse than outdoor air quality. And homes with gas stoves emit 50 to 400 times as much of a very powerful air pollutant called nitrogen dioxide that we'll talk about in a minute than homes with electric stoves. Next slide. This is an important thing to know, because asthma is the second most common chronic illness in Massachusetts. One in eight children in Massachusetts have it. And 15% of that is attributable to gas stove use next. That's a problem, because gas stove usage is widespread in our state. Over 50% of over half of the houses in Massachusetts use gas to cook, houses and apartments. And in fact, as I mentioned earlier, this was a study in 2017 from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health showing that gas stoves are the number one trigger for indoor asthma, number one trigger indoors for childhood asthma exacerbations. As we mentioned before about outdoor air pollution, this too is an equity issue. Lower income households are at higher risk of exposure and illness. Why is that? Because their houses and apartments tend to be smaller. Their ventilation, they might be older homes, they don't have as fantastic ventilation. Also, frankly, With an effort to try to get houses tighter in terms of not leaking as much and being climate friendly and that kind of thing, by making the envelope of the house tighter, you therefore cut down on the ventilation too. And that's another factor that isn't on the slide in terms of increasing. Sometimes households use that stove or oven to supplement heat. They're also disproportionately exposed to outdoor air pollution. All of that adds up to a greater asthma burden. Next slide. So some people ask me, well, why haven't I ever heard about this? When we first passed a policy at the Massachusetts Medical Society to just raise awareness in the general community about asthma and childhood asthma and gastrofuse, I remember going to a party after this passed. It was just a holiday party, and mentioning that this happened. And someone looked at me, and they were like, what? What are you talking about? You're the first person in the world who has ever said anything to me about this. Now, I have to say that since that time, that was 2019, and since doctors have started speaking up about this issue, the number of articles in the popular press has just increased exponentially. It was like no one talked about it before, and therefore, no one did much about it either. And why? Well, the same reason sort of is the same as what happened with cigarettes. The cigarette companies knew since the 1950s that smoking cigarettes was bad for people's lungs, and they also knew that it was bad for other people in the household, so-called secondhand smoke. Well, it was the same thing with this issue. This has been extensively studied since about the 1980s. We have had really good data showing that gas stove use is not good for people's health. And yet, it hasn't gotten out there. When the Massachusetts Medical Society passed that resolution to let the public be more aware of this association, I was actually approached by a former EPA official who thanked me for bringing this to light because she said it had just been so concerning for such a long time and it wasn't getting enough attention. Next slide. So this is just a list of the different health organizations that have now recognized the association between gas stove pollution and childhood asthma, the AMA, the American Public Health Association, Mass Medical Society. Next slide, please. So why are gas stoves a health hazard? And why am I calling them like the secondhand smoke of our time? Well, it turns out that just like cigarette smoke, they actually emit the same really powerful pollutants that cigarettes do. Really interesting. Next slide, please. So they produce, as cigarettes, Many more things than the three things I've listed here, but I'm gonna focus on these, because they actually produce hundreds of different pollutants. But the big ones are something called PM2.5, which is particulate matter. It's an air pollutant. It's associated with asthma, COPD, heart attack, stroke. Also, nitrogen dioxide, another air pollutant and respiratory irritant, and carbon monoxide, which many people know from carbon monoxide poisoning, which can happen in the house, but it happens whenever you light up a cigarette, you can get some carbon monoxide, and it also happens when you cook on your stove. Next slide, please. I love to talk about, I think particulate matter is super interesting. So what you see at the bottom of the slide there is a shaft of your hair. 30 particles of particulate matter of this size, 2.5 microns, They're so small that 30 of them can fit into the diameter of a shaft of hair. So that's the size of pollution we're talking about. Why are we concerned about it? Because when you inhale it, it can penetrate deep into the lung where it triggers things like asthma, and then it can cross into the bloodstream from the lung where it can go to the heart and cause inflammation and cause things like heart attack. It can go up to the brain and cause inflammation and cause things like stroke. The important thing, it's associated with pneumonia and high blood pressure. The things to remember, children are especially vulnerable. It's especially at high levels, at stroller level. So when you're pushing a child along the street, that's where the particulate matter is the highest. And the other important thing to know is that, as I've mentioned before, risk exists at any level. So the EPA has given a cutoff level of what they call satisfactory, but it turns out that we see health effects down to the very lowest level. Next slide. Nitrogen dioxide. This is just a slide showing that the more nitrogen dioxide you have in the air, the more severe asthma reaction you're going to have. It's interesting that you start to get effects at about a level of 10 parts per billion. The safe cutoff for our EPA is 100. So you're allowed to be exposed to a hundred parts per billion But as you can see you get symptoms far below that and it also just lists where gas stoves versus electric stoves Tend to emit. I find that the most interesting thing about nitrogen dioxide when I was at a medical conference years ago one of my pulmonologist colleagues brought a really interesting contraption into the conference and I and he had collected some really polluted air outside, just right outside the convention center, the air that we had been breathing until we walked in to go to this seminar. And he brought it into the convention center, and he said, I have this really cool machine where I breathe it in, and then when I exhale, it can show all the different pollutants that are in the air that I've just breathed out. So you guys can see the pollution in the air that I'm breathing in, and then in the air that I'm breathing out. And actually, this data has been around since the 1960s. There's an article in Nature that shows this happening back then, too. And so he breathed in this extremely polluted air from outside. And when he breathed out, how much nitrogen dioxide was in what he breathed out? Nothing. And what does that mean? That means it's all in your lungs. So he was nicely filtering it for the rest of us. So think about that. And that's why these kids are so affected. They're really little. They're breathing in all of these super irritants, and they're staying in their lungs. Next slide. So, it's sort of a recurrent theme now. Children are exposed both to outdoor and indoor air pollution. So, they're cumulative and that's something to remember too. And again, the predominant source indoors is your gas stove. Next slide. And often, indoor emissions from gas stoves exceed outside, outdoor regulatory standards. Incredibly, there are no indoor air pollution standards for any pollutant whatsoever. It isn't regulated. Next slide, please. Very important slide. Gas stoves, if you don't use ventilation, if you have a house or an apartment that's less than 1,500 square feet, the nitrogen dioxide in your house is going to exceed regulatory standards 83% of the time. If you have a home or an apartment less than 1,000 square feet and you don't use ventilation, it's going to exceed regulatory standards all the time, 100% of the time. Next slide. Does cooking with gas increase asthma risk? Yes, it does, 42%. Next slide. And the other really important thing to know, that just again, this data is just fresh from the last year, is that even when the stove isn't turned on, gas stoves leak. And they leak bad stuff. They don't just leak methane. There was an article in the Boston Globe the other day about a woman She lived in Dorchester and her little dog was lying on the sofa and it died because her gas stove was leaking methane and methane is an asphyxiant gas. You go to Wikipedia and it says methane is an innocuous asphyxiant gas and I was like, well, innocuous means not harmful and asphyxiant means that you die from not being able to breathe and so you can't really say that it's both. But it leaks. Do you want me to wrap up? Is it, okay, okay. So another, so in addition to methane, which is an asphyxiant, killed the poor little puppy, but they don't just leak methane, they leak other stuff. They leak something called benzene, which is a known cause of cancer. It, like particulate matter, there's no safe level, it affects the nervous system, can cause birth defects, and it also leaks a bunch of other chemicals. Next slide. And by the way, it doesn't matter how expensive your stove is. The cheapest stoves and the most expensive stoves leak. And this is just an interesting slide. So some people say, well, how do I know that I won't get all of these pollutants if I cook on an electric stove? So this is a study showing whenever you burn anything, you're going to get some particulate matter. But it's interesting that when you cook with gas, you get a lot more particulate matter, and you also get all those other pollutants, the nitrogen dioxide, the VOCs, which is benzene, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide. Next slide. The health cost, asthma costs on the order of like $80 billion in the US annually. If you break that down to a per person per family cost for what you'll spend on asthma in a year, it comes out to some like $3,200 a year. What's the cost of an electric stove? Like $500 to $1,000. So when you think about the health cost to society versus the cost of changing out that stove, maybe it's something to think about when your stove's ready to die. Next slide. I just thought I'd quote a bunch of interesting data that just came out like two weeks ago from a really great article in Science from both Harvard and Stanford researchers. And they looked at both, because many people, there's another article that I quoted in there that I wrote a couple years ago. People wrote to me afterwards saying, but what about propane gas? Because we cook with propane gas, and is that as bad as methane gas, which most of us have? And it turns out, yes, it is. And they looked at the US as a whole, and they found that the pediatric asthma cases due to the nitrogen dioxide from gas and propane stoves is like 50,000 a year across the US. But if you look at all the pollutants we just talked about, the benzene and the carbon monoxide and the nitrogen dioxide, it's more like 200,000 cases of pediatric asthma a year. So that is a whopping number. Mortality, they made a mortality estimate. They said up to 19,000 adult deaths annually from gas stove use in the U.S. pretty a whopping, and what's the mortality cost of that? They said on the order of a billion dollars a year in the US, and actually then they broke it down to communities of color, and they found that the price tag was even higher. The most concerning thing actually to me about this study was that they didn't just look at levels of these pollutants in the kitchen. They went all over the house and they found that the levels of pollutants in the bedrooms were equally as elevated and they stayed elevated for hours after the gas stove was used. So something else to think about. Next slide. So what can we do about it? Does ventilation help reduce nitrogen dioxide levels? And the answer is a definite maybe. It works if you use it. I'm one of those people who, I didn't know this data till I was, till about 2017 or later. And so in the winter when my kids were little, I used to put, my ventilation like leaked like a sieve and you know this is Massachusetts it's cold so I've thought I was being really smart and I covered it with plastic, so that I wouldn't get a ton of cold air coming right through the vent from the outside. And then my kids got asthma, and then I started reading about this data, and I thought, gosh, you know, I'm gonna take the cover, all that plastic I put on in the winter, off of my vent. And I didn't even run it that much, but because it created a constant draft, at the end of, my son was a big runner, and at the end of his cross country season, I was like, you know, I'm never at the end of the race, so I haven't seen you using your inhaler, How many times did you use it this season? And he was like, I didn't use it this season. But the problem with ventilation is people don't like to use it. I found at the end, right before our gas stove died, and I became more and more concerned. I have to let you know that one of the researchers who carried out that Harvard study I mentioned, she uses an N95 mask when she cooks on her gas stove. I don't think I could do that, because anyway, I don't think I could do that. But I did start running my fan every single time I ran my gas stove. And I noticed that the whole kitchen just cleared out. Like I wanted quiet in the kitchen and I just turned on that fan, my husband was gone, the kids were gone, no one was in the kitchen, no one likes using the fan. So that's a real problem is compliance. People just don't use it, they don't like it, it's annoying, it's loud. But it does work as long as it vents to the outside. If it doesn't vent to the outside, if it's one of those fans that just recirculates things in the kitchen, those ones can actually end up with levels of pollution higher than what you started out with. So those are really not good. And then if you don't have a fan that goes to the outside, open a window. Opening a window works great. Next slide. And so this is just a whole bunch of recommendations to install a carbon monoxide detector. I recommend getting a pretty expensive one. I didn't get an expensive one. And our heat exchanger on our gas furnace died and melted. And we ended up having carbon monoxide all over the house. And our monitor never picked it up. I smelled the weird burning smell, and I called the gas company. And my family was like, what's the problem? Well, the levels were really, really high. That was the problem. Opening a window, cooking on the back burners, using other electric appliances like a toaster oven or a kettle, a plug-in induction stove, and then ultimately, when you can and if you can, switching to an electric or an induction stove. Next slide. So the proof in a lot of medical studies is, well, when you take whatever you think is causing a medical condition away, does it get better? This is a really nice study in Ecuador showing that replacing gas stoves with induction stoves reduced markedly emergency room visits and hospitalizations. Next slide. And right now, there was also a study in the Bronx that showed the same thing. And now we have a study ongoing in collaboration with the BU School of Public Health in Dorchester, where they are looking at the environmental and health effects of replacing a gas stove with an electric one. Now I should just mention, it's very interesting in the Bronx study, I don't have the data up here, But it only reduced the air pollutants in the air by about 30%. But I showed you in the earlier slide of gas stoves versus electric stoves, you know, when you go to an electric stove, it should take all of those air pollutants out. And I think that tells us that the problem is in communities of color, if you take away the indoor air pollution, you still have the problem, which is that the outdoor air pollution didn't go away. And so this gets at some of the problem, but we still have to face that whole problem. Next slide. So just a few takeaways. Now you know gas stoves are the number one trigger for asthma and an indoor trigger in the state of Massachusetts. And communities of color are disproportionately and unfairly burdened by that. What can we do to stop those negative health effects? You can vent your stovetop emissions, but remember, they have to vent outside. You can't just recirculate them. Open your windows. Keep the children, elderly people, people with asthma away from the stove while you're cooking. I think a really important part of this, too, obviously is going to happen at the policy level. This isn't mentioned much, but one thing I'm kind of passionate about is, you know, There's external ventilation required for hot water heaters and your gas dryer. You wouldn't think of venting that inside, right? Or your gas furnace. You wouldn't think of venting that inside. Gas stoves used to vent outside. And at some point, In the last 40 years, that changed. And so I feel very strongly that gas stoves should vent outside. I think putting a warning label on stoves. There's a warning label on my hairdryer, like do not drop this into a tub when you're using it because there's a risk of electric shock. I don't think 19,000 people die every year in the US because they've dropped their hair dryer in a bathtub and gotten an electric shock, and yet there's a label on it. But 19,000 people a year die from gas stove exposure and there's no label on it. Where does that square up? Dozen. And then, obviously, replacing a gas stove with an electric or an induction when you need a new one. And then, most importantly, I think, is regulating air pollution, outdoor air pollution. Because yes, you can get rid of indoor air pollution, but if you don't regulate the outdoor one, and say, enforce the roadmap law that was just passed in Massachusetts a year and a half ago, saying that we shouldn't be locating dirty incinerators and power plants, et cetera, in communities of color that are already overburdened by all of those. It's time to make that all happen. And that's all I have. I have some resources, next slide. And then next slide, more resources. So I'm happy to share those with you afterwards. I don't, I should have brought a handout, but I didn't. And I'm happy to take any questions. You're all probably in shock. You're like, oh no, the gas stove. I love the gas stove. I love gas stoves too. But you get used to electric. Yes. So do you want to take her the mic? Yeah.
[SPEAKER_11]: So you mentioned the gas stove and the effect on asthma. What about the heating system and, you know, the pipes that sometimes most landlords don't update and they are full of soot and, you know, sometimes you can see it actually at the top of the ventilator spreading dust and you know, so that's another thing. I suffered from this, my older son, I lived in an apartment that had this problem and I noticed dark circles around his eyes. Doctors mentioned something related to the ventilation system but they did not confirm or like, initiate anything that you need to move from this apartment, you know?
[SPEAKER_09]: Yeah, I think it's a huge problem, obviously, because it isn't just gas stoves, it's also gas furnaces. I had a gas furnace that was probably leaking carbon monoxide for a good six months before I realized it, and I noticed I never get headaches, and I was getting headaches every day. I, my eyes, the whites of my eyes were kind of injected, they were red, and I was like, that's odd, I'm, you know, and I was tired all the time, I'm never tired. And Later, I realized, oh my gosh, I was suffering from chronic carbon monoxide exposure because my gas furnace was releasing all of this stuff. Gas furnaces can leak just like stoves leak. So can hot water heaters. They are also doing a study of gas leaks in houses across Massachusetts, and I had someone come to the house the other day as part of the study, and he just put his monitor over on the hot water heater, and I had smelled gas over at the hot water heater, and sure enough, It was leaking gas and I got it fixed.
[SPEAKER_11]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_09]: Other questions? Don't be shy.
[SPEAKER_10]: So I had a question about using the back burners. Is that because you're further away from and does the ventilation have anything to do with that? it going outside as opposed to in the house?
[SPEAKER_09]: My guess is that it is, first of all, you're farther away from the pollutants, so you're not getting it right in the face. And second of all, when you're using a vent with a hood that's over the stove, then it lifts. They work better. That works better on the back burners.
[SPEAKER_01]: Other questions? My question is, doesn't It's just the amount of gas stove that we have throughout, I mean, I don't say only Massachusetts, but everywhere. It's much more, it's much greater than the electric stove. Isn't that because of the price? Electricity is more expensive than gas?
[SPEAKER_09]: Do you know that probably does have something to do with it? Also, But that's not the whole story, right? Because what's the other part of the story? It was heavily marketed. I remember when I had just gotten married and I was talking to all my friends and everyone was like, oh. All the chefs were coming out and saying, oh, cooking with gas is so much better. And who were they being paid by? The American Gas Association. And so there at some point might have been a price point. I can't say that I really notice a difference with my electric stove versus my gas stove and the amount that it costs to run the stove. Yeah, but think what you're saving in hospital bills. Yeah. Yeah. It might have been at one point, but now I think that they're getting more efficient. As I said, I have a newer model, and it doesn't, induction is very efficient, very, very efficient, and that uses electromagnetic waves.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I would just add that an induction cooktop like this is about half the cost to operate as a traditional electric stove.
[SPEAKER_09]: And you don't have to buy the whole stove. You can just buy the single burner that she has on display right there. And that way you can, it's amazing how much you can get around not using your gas stove. Yeah. Other questions?
[SPEAKER_11]: Yeah. have to use the mic.
[SPEAKER_15]: I think it's in that same vein with the economic burden on communities of color. So how are there any resources? I know there's like a program with the city of Dorchester and BU to the public health of like how much does it cost to upgrade from gas stove to electric stove? Would there be any resources for that?
[SPEAKER_09]: That's an excellent question. I do believe that there is a government program, a Massachusetts program, Mass Save, $500 off buying an induction or electric stove or induction. OK. Yeah. So there is. And also to change to a heat pump, actually, if you want to change the form of your heating to an electric one. There's a discount there, too.
[SPEAKER_08]: Thank you. That was a great presentation. To you and Brenda, can you talk about the price points for the induction and how the MassSave program works? So if you want to just purchase it outright or if you want to go through MassSave.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks. Yes, so a portable induction cooktop like this one is a little bit over $100. A full-size stove with an induction cooktop is more expensive than a standard stove. It might be $1,000 more expensive, but with the mass-save rebate of $500, then it's $500 more expensive. I cooked on a portable induction cooktop like this for a year. I occasionally would use my gas stove as a backup when I had to use multiple burners, but I was able to do this almost exclusively for a year. Oh, I bought this on Amazon, but I think it's pretty available at like Home Depot's or Best Buy's or sorry, Best Buy's, things like that. Yeah.
[SPEAKER_09]: Good question. Thank you.
[SPEAKER_06]: We got another question. Yes. Do you have to buy a special pot to cook for the?
[SPEAKER_09]: That is also a good question, and I'm sure Brenda could tell you more about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah. Sorry, I should just stay standing. So the pots do have to be magnetic because that's how this works is it creates a magnetic field that heats up just the metal in the pot. So stainless steel, cast iron, if you have ceramic with like metal inside of it, that would work. But it wouldn't work with copper or glass or things like that. But basically, you can test out your cookware. If you have a magnet, just test your cookware. If it sticks, then it'll work.
[SPEAKER_09]: It's a really good question. It's why we actually went with electric and not induction because my husband was like I'm not gonna give up on my favorite pots which we tested them with a magnet and they weren't magnetic so yeah Well, thank you all so much I
[SPEAKER_15]: Thank you, Dr. Lundberg. If you want to learn how to use an induction stove, Brenda will be right over and show you how to use it.
[SPEAKER_13]: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we basically put it on our website, and it's open for you to interact with us. I'll give that to you later.
[SPEAKER_07]: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. How's that? Great. So is that, so do you work with the USDA, or is it?
[SPEAKER_14]: Yeah, what am I being interrupted? I mean, what are you gonna do? Wait, what? And it's not a big deal either.
[SPEAKER_02]: The QR code, do we have the code up there too? Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: But I would love to get that info, because my parents have gas. And I'm like, uh-uh.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what I'm saying. Like, $100, though, but then you have family. How are you going to get gas? This is like really,
[SPEAKER_07]: I hope you guys support a real work in progress.
[SPEAKER_02]: I wanted everyone to do their stuff, you know? And plus, like, me, like, I tell everyone.
[SPEAKER_06]: I don't have to go. Yeah, I know.
[SPEAKER_05]: I love you. I love you.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I'm just connecting the dots. I'm telling the truth.
[SPEAKER_07]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: You guys are gorgeous.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know it's a big city.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Because I feel like people, when they say just Syria, they don't go to it.
[SPEAKER_06]: But if they're specifically towards them, they'll even talk about it.
[SPEAKER_07]: Because you know, it's more of a good area.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, that's a good message to send to the general public. I would love to, but the average woman would walk up to me and say, you know, we have Syria, we're on it. 10 years from now? Little by little, because people will start talking about it, especially like now.
[SPEAKER_06]: People are going to start talking about it next year. We'll have more people. That's all I got. I just memorized one line.