The poor relationship between self-reported cooking
frequency and PM exposure among women who cook
may be a consequence of random error in the selfreporting
of cooking frequency or that less frequent
cooks are still present during cooking. Differences in
activity patterns may also change the intensity of
exposure among women who fall into the same
category of cooking frequency (Ezzati et al., 2000).
Non-cooks had significantly lower exposure than
cooks; however, this categorization is of minimal use
for health studies in places like our study region where
the number of non-cooks is extremely small (5% of
enrolled women).
The PM2.5 exposure concentrations observed in our