To say don't use a wood burner if you have children in the house?

And as for all the "we only burn seasoned wood" people, there's 10 more burning absolute shit that they've scavenged or all their plastic, as they can't be asked to recycle it. You only have to wander about of an evening and look up at the shitty black chimneys and then smell the stench of unsuitable stuff being incinerated or worse, gently simmered as that's even worse for the environment and people.

Do the people defending recreational burning here know to run their fires at higher temps?

If you have CH, really, this is just a hobby.

Was her kids health affected?

I think it was only really after Roy Castles death (1994) that passive smoking was confirmed to be a bad thing

Wood is not toxic ffs

Yeah all of these things increase particulate exposure and also some of them are annoying in lots of other ways too.

But - apart from the slurry part which sounds grim and lasted for ages - they are also fairly short lived.
One evening of a fireworks display or a couple of nights of a BBQ in summer do increases you particulate exposure and if you already have asthma night trigger an attack.

But the long term health risks are driven more by sustained high exposure. Like being at home for 16 hours a day with a wood burner for every day of your life.

The others things are bad but that doesn't mean that wood burners at home are worse and also in most cases, a choice.

For those citing the study saying particulates were high in a bakery - yes, this is unsurprising. Burning gas in an enclosed space is a well known source of particulates as is flour dust.

If the child was spending 16 hours day in a bakery, this would indeed be a health risk. And there is plenty of evidence that workers in bakeries face elevated respiratory damage risk so much that it is known as "baker's asthma" (which is also triggered by the very fine flour dust) but which studies now show is also connected to the cleaning of ash from ovens.

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/11/4/415

But the child is probably spending maximum ten minutes in a bakery a few times a week so this is going to have a much lower health impacts than what happens for sixteen to twenty four hours a day at home.

So feel free to pop into the bakery on your walk to school.

Life does include unavoidable exposure to elevated levels of particulates, like walking past a bakery or due to tyres from cars.

But lots of exposure to particulates is entirely avoidable. For the vast majority of people, wood burning is a choice. Why would you want to increase your child's exposure to particulates? It is the sustained exposure at high levels that is the risk of causing long term harm to you and particularly to children. A bakery visit or even an annual bonfire isn't the concern.

And for anyone who says "well it never did me any harm" - my granny smoked like a chimney an made it to 98. That doesn't disprove that smoking is dangerous and increases your risk of early death hugely.

My gran thought it was absolutely obvious nonsense that there was any such thing as passive smoking (she reluctantly admitted there might be some chance of harm to the smoker themselves) and that she didn't need any study to show her that. And her kids were fine living in a house where the adults smoked 40 a day, further proving it! She was a nurse, incidentally, and very far from unusual in her generation in this belief that passive smoking was a made-up risk and that this was so patently obvious that any evidence to the contrary was clearly propaganda from the fun police.

For those citing the study saying particulates were high in a bakery - yes, this is unsurprising. Burning gas in an enclosed space is a well known source of particulates as is flour dust.

If the child was spending 16 hours day in a bakery, this would indeed be a health risk. And there is plenty of evidence that workers in bakeries face elevated respiratory damage risk so much that it is known as "baker's asthma" (which is also triggered by the very fine flour dust) but which studies now show is also connected to the cleaning of ash from ovens.

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/11/4/415

But the child is probably spending maximum ten minutes in a bakery a few times a week so this is going to have a much lower health impacts than what happens for sixteen to twenty four hours a day at home.

So feel free to pop into the bakery on your walk to school.

Life does include unavoidable exposure to elevated levels of particulates, like walking past a bakery or due to tyres from cars.

But lots of exposure to particulates is entirely avoidable. For the vast majority of people, wood burning is a choice. Why would you want to increase your child's exposure to particulates? It is the sustained exposure at high levels that is the risk of causing long term harm to you and particularly to children. A bakery visit or even an annual bonfire isn't the concern.

And for anyone who says "well it never did me any harm" - my granny smoked like a chimney an made it to 98. That doesn't disprove that smoking is dangerous and increases your risk of early death hugely.

I do worry about the impact of wood burners on neighbour’s health. Fine to say the pollutants are sent up the chimney and out the house but that just means it’s going into the local atmosphere. Fair enough if you chose that health risk for yourself but what about those around you, particularly neighbouring children with asthma who have no choice but to breathe it in. I find it really surprising that in an age when we are concerned about pollution, and burning fossil fuels, how many people seem to think it’s completely fine to burn a carbon based product in their home.

It's completely unconnected and irrelevant to them - it's not like we all have to choose between wood fumes or factory emissions so people are installing wood burners to get the factory emissions away!

Is it worse than breathing incar fumes? Or factory emissions? Or agriicultural burning?

See I get turned off by hysterical hyperbole. There’s no way that a stove is as bad as passive smoking. I don’t even need any research to tell me that. You know passive smoking where the pollution is so bad you can see, taste and smell the pollution vs a stove where the pollution in the house is so minimal none of those things are true.

hope you don’t burn scented candles OP. They’re just as bad.

I do worry about the impact of wood burners on neighbour’s health. Fine to say the pollutants are sent up the chimney and out the house but that just means it’s going into the local atmosphere. Fair enough if you chose that health risk for yourself but what about those around you, particularly neighbouring children with asthma who have no choice but to breathe it in. I find it really surprising that in an age when we are concerned about pollution, and burning fossil fuels, how many people seem to think it’s completely fine to burn a carbon based product in their home.

https://www.dsawsp.org/health/children-and-wood-smoke#:~:text=A%20study%20linked%20pollution%20specifically,when%20air%20pollution%20levels%20rise.