I'd have to go hunt down the numbers again but the studies were claiming something like 12% of Asthma was potentially gas cooking triggered, but it could be 3% if more of them used better ventilation. It was also super common here in Australia growing up in the 90s to have gas stoves installed under the old wood stove Chimney with no active exhaust fan. That's much less common in my city now since we've built a large portion of the total housing stock since then, but it would make sense for kids in the 80s & 90s to have been maybe more affected by this than now. It's also super common in brand new 90s builds just to have a fan in the roof at roof height, the same as you'd have in a bathroom. Only in the 2000s have the rangehoods right above the stove become the standard. Not sure how effective those roof fans would be in practice against these kinds of pollutants.

However, on those new builds that all have rangehoods, here in Australia they are all so loud. Increasingly our building regulations require them ducted and usually out the roof. They cannot deal with the static pressure and sit at 65-70dB and even when they are working, people don't want to use them. That's on the lowest fan speed.

Without any ducting or being ducted out a wall only 30cm or so, they are still kindof noisy but not mind bendingly so. At my brand new house, and those of many others I've asked (it's not just a bad install here) you get a real sense of relief when you turn it off. It's wild.

What upsets me the most about this, is that there are plenty of much quieter solutions that aren't even really that expensive to make. The problem seems to be a combination of having the fan right behind the filter at head height (easier/cheaper packaging) instead of remote in the ductwork, the style of fan commonly used not being great with static pressure and the noise rating not requiring any testing against static pressure even though our building regulations now require that in most cases. On top of that, all the "cheaper" brands just don't seem to care.

There is also engineering that I see other companies do to flatten out the sound curve so the noise is emitted on different frequencies. I don't see any of that kind of design in these products. You see that in MacBook Pro fans and I think my favourite demo was the Zipline drones where they made the drone fans almost inaudible compared to what you normally get on drones with the same technique.. you can see that in practice in Mark Rober's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOWDNBu9DkU

We have the same problem with bathroom exhaust fans. The major brands all the builders used, you just don't want them on. Similar noise levels though (possibly due to the lack of fine grease filter) slightly different frequency profile. For exhaust fans you can buy much, much quieter models for almost no more money. The Clipsal CEF40 nearly every builder here uses is, at retail, $110-130. The Fanco Luna Pro 200 is about $85.

The same is not true of rangehoods though, most of the entry level brands (Westinghouse, Electrolux, Technika, etc) all seem stupidly loud, and only the real high end brands (e.g. Miele) market and sell quieter models. I've yet to track down a solution in that regard.. b

I wrote to the "wirecutter" of Australia, Choice, to ask that they include static pressure testing in their rangehood and exhaust fan testing - sadly so far only got the typical feedback recorded and have yet to see anything come of that.

In the mean time I purchased a flow hood and using the iPhone NIOSH app am on a mission to document the actual flow, installation situation (length and height of ducting, etc) and the noise level in practice and see if I can find some patterns and make some recommendations to people.

Small pet peeve... I'd love to find some people to find out similar in other countries. Not sure if we just have poor standards, terrible manufacturers here, or what.

Now, all of this aside, you should absolutely be using a rangehood when cooking anything anyway. Cooking produces lots of cruft you're better off sucking out. But it seems not too well argued to be much worse to cook with Gas without a rangehood and factors like this seem to impact people not using them. Those arguing against this research etc mostly seem to go down the path of using ventilation makes it OK.