| Indoor air pollution (IAP) is a critical environmental and public health problems faced by developing worlds, including China, and has attacted lots of concerns from all over the world. WHO has pointed out in his Annual Health Report 2002, indoor smoke from solid fuel is one of top ten risk factors in terms of causing disease burden. IAP is even worse in places in develping coutries because in such places it has a high elevation and the weather is cold, people has to rely more on biomass fuel, bad quality coal, and bad ventilationed furnaces to perform their cooking and heating activities.Guizhou province is located in south-west China, in the Yunnan-Guizhou platue. The dominating topograph is mountains and hills, occupying 92.5% of the total area of the province. It has a high elevation, averaged at 1100 meters. It also has the data like, multi-nationalities, bad economy, and large poor and rural population. Affected by air circulation and topography, the climate is not stable here and disastous weather often occurs. Due to the special location and confounding topography, Guizhou has a good biodiversity. Since it is usually cold and cloudy in winter in Guizhou, and plus another fact Guizhou has rich reservation of coal, it is natural that there is a large demanding for coal, for heating in winter. So coal is the major domestic fuel for most Guizhou rural households, and as a sequence, some local diseases caused by coal combustion have been highly concerned by many departments. However, some poor population in rural Guizhou can not afford coal for all domestic use, and then they have to use some biomass fuel as an option. That means in rual Guizhou, the indoor air pollution is cuased by multi-fule sources. It is urgent to do something for the rural IAP, to explore effective intervention measures to improve the IAP awearness in the poor rural popution and finally upgrade their health level.National Environment and Health Program (2007-2015) has pointed out, timely and effective analysis on the impacts cuased by environmental factors, knowing well with the developing trend in fields of environemtnal pollution and health impacts, is the scientific basis unpon which we can design and implement effective interventions. So, obtaining the baseline information regarding IAP in rural Guizhou shows profound implications to the next work- looking for the effective and apspropriatie nterventions.This study investigated the IAP baseline in three villages, Qiangfeng village of Xiuwen County, Lianmin village of Suiyang County Zunyi City, Guaiji village of Wudang District Guiyang City, which represented typical coal-use, biomass-use, and biogas use villages respecitively. In each village, 150 households are selected as objects to be surveyed. Questionnaires are sent to them and asked them about social and economic data, house pattern, cooking and heating fuel and furnace, IAP related knowledge and attitude; expenditure status and willing, how much they are willing to pay for IAP improvements and etc. The results will be used as bascic data input to the next proceedings such as cost-benefit analysis of the interventions for this project.For each question, we put a value (character vaiable or number vaiable) to its answer, and then handle them with some mathmethical tools. We have analyze multi-parameters involved with IAP issues for the three typical villages, and compared the extensity to which the villaged suffered from domestic fuel cuased IAP and determined out the right one from the three that needs IAP intervention most.The study result revealed that in rural Guizhou, most people are in low eudcuation level, and have poor IAP awareness, few of them has taken some IAP improvements spontaneously. Also the economy is a factor limiting their IAP behavior. In order to figure out which one is the village needing IAP intervention most urgently, we compared them from many aspects, as for fuel, biogas-use village scored highest, followed by wood-use village, and then by coal-use village; as for furnace, biogas-use village is the number one again, the second is coal-use village, and the last is wood-use village; as for IAP awareness/behavior, coal-use village is better than biogas- and wood-use villages. The sums of weighed factors indicated that wood-use village is the one needing IAP intervention most. The outputs from this study also perfomed as the basic data and paved ways for next stages of the project, for example indoor air monitoring, establishing exposure-response function, cost-benefits anlsis for proposed interventions, and implementation of IAP intervention.
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