Burning plastic alongside firewood in household cooking areas releases chemicals that are extremely harmful to the lungs, the head of Sri Lanka’s National Cancer Control Programme has warned.
Dr Hasarali Fernando, Consultant Community Physician and head of the programme, said the practice was common because firewood does not catch easily, the Daily Mirror reported on Thursday afternoon.
People use plastic pieces, plastic sacks and yoghurt cups to start or maintain a fire, she said.
“The chemicals released when such materials are used are extremely harmful to our lungs,” she said.
The advice is not to abandon firewood
Dr Fernando was explicit that the warning is about what is burned and where, not about firewood itself.
“We cannot simply tell people not to use firewood. However, there is no issue with setting up a wood-burning stove in a well-ventilated area, as ventilation allows the smoke to escape outside,” she said.
Her recommendations are therefore narrow and practical: do not burn plastic or other waste to light a cooking fire, and ventilate the cooking area so smoke can leave it. That matters in a country where a large share of rural households still cook on wood.
Why the programme is raising it now
The same official set out the scale of the disease in a separate briefing the same day. Lung cancer remains one of the world’s deadliest cancers, with more than 2,100 cases reported in Sri Lanka in a single year, NewsFirst reported at 12.37 p.m.
Figures from the National Cancer Registry for 2023 — the most recent year cited — record 39,658 cancer patients, of whom more than 18,000 were men and about 21,500 were women.
Of that total, 2,142 cases were lung cancer, split 1,521 in men against 621 in women. Lung cancer is the third most common cancer in Sri Lankan men, after oral cancer and prostate-related cancers, and accounts for around 12 per cent of all cancers diagnosed in men.
Dr Fernando said early detection substantially improves survival, and stressed that a lung cancer diagnosis is not always a death sentence.
What connects the two
The two filings are angles on the same official’s public message, and read together they supply something neither does alone: the Daily Mirror carries the behavioural advice without the disease burden, and NewsFirst carries the burden without the advice.
One caution. Neither filing states that burning plastic with firewood causes the lung cancers counted in the registry, and this desk does not assert it. Dr Fernando’s stated concern is indoor air pollution and harm to the lungs. The registry figures establish how large the lung cancer burden is; they are not presented by either outlet as an attribution of cause, and the single largest established risk factor for lung cancer — tobacco — is not mentioned in either report.
Not reported
Neither filing names the chemicals released, gives a figure for how many Sri Lankan households cook with firewood, or cites evidence quantifying the risk from the specific practice described.
Neither says what proportion of lung cancer cases in Sri Lanka is attributed to indoor air pollution as against smoking or occupational exposure, whether the 2,142 figure is rising or falling against earlier years, or why 2023 is the latest registry year available. Neither reports what the briefing was convened for, or whether the programme is planning a public campaign on cooking-area ventilation.
