Health and Haze: The Immediate and Medium Term Effects of Smoke Inundation on the Health of Adults in Indonesia

Elizabeth Frankenberg, University of California, Los Angeles
Douglas M. McKee, University of California, Los Angeles

In the last half of 1997, smoke from the worst forest fires in decades blanketed parts of Borneo, Sumatra, and peninsular Malaysia for several months. This paper measures the immediate and medium-term impact of the fires on the health of the Indonesian population by combining population-based household survey data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS) with satellite measures of smoke levels. This paper offers three advances over previous work. First, because we use data from Indonesia, we are able to examine directly the setting where exposures were heaviest. Second, because our data are population-based, rather than based on the subset of individuals who appeared for inpatient or outpatient health care, our results are representative of the general population. Third, because our survey contains an array of health status measures, we are not limited to considering only the health outcomes of mortality and respiratory morbidity.