Gas Stoves Are Tied to Health Concerns. Here’s How to Lower Your Risk.

Mounting evidence of the potential health risks of gas stoves, including a link to childhood asthma, has ignited a debate in Washington, after a commissioner of the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission suggested in January that his agency might move to regulate these kitchen appliances.

Responding to the firestorm, Alexander Hoehn-Saric, the agency’s chairman, issued a statement at the time, saying, “Research indicates that emissions from gas stoves can be hazardous, and the C.P.S.C. is looking for ways to reduce related indoor air quality hazards. But to be clear, I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the C.P.S.C. has no proceeding to do so.”

“No one should freak out about this news,” said Dr. Aaron Bernstein, the interim director of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who has studied gas stoves and pollutants. But Dr. Bernstein and other researchers say that it’s important to understand, and mitigate, the dangers of gas stoves, which are used in about 40 million homes nationwide.

Potential health hazards of gas stoves

For the last 50 years or so, researchers have demonstrated that exposure to gas stoves can be harmful to humans, said Brady Seals, a manager at the environmental think tank R.M.I.

When you use a gas stove, it emits poisonous gases called nitrogen oxides, including nitrogen dioxide, a respiratory irritant thought to trigger asthma (cars, boats and other machines also release these gases). A study published last year found that families who use gas stoves in homes with poor ventilation, or without range hoods, can blow past the national standard for safe hourly outdoor exposure to nitrogen oxides within just a few minutes; there are no agreed upon standards for nitrogen oxides in indoor air. Rates of nitrogen oxide emission levels were in direct proportion to the amount of gas the stove was burning, said Eric Lebel, a senior scientist at P.S.E. Healthy Energy, a nonprofit science and policy research institute focusing on energy and the environment, and the lead author on the study.

Ms. Seals co-authored a paper published in December that found that gas-burning stoves may be linked to nearly 13 percent of childhood cases of asthma in the U.S. Past research shows that gas stoves led to more exacerbated asthma symptoms as well, she said.