In its action to fight against poor housing, the Abbé Pierre Foundation has often wondered how living in insufficiently heated housing could have an impact on health. Having found no existing study on the subject, the Foundation co-financed its own study on links between energy poverty and health and asked its local partners to carry out parallel investigations in the Hérault and in the North of France.
As the Foundation explains, the public met by its partners in Hérault and the Douai (North) region is often made up of poor, fragile, weak or temporarily or permanently disadvantaged households who are asking for help. to improve their living conditions.
“In the Hérault as in the Douaisis, these requests are often based on two reasons: either an excessive load of energy bills linked to housing which could lead to unpaid bills or energy cuts, or the inability in winter to reach a temperature of comfort in good conditions ”.
To find out whether these precarious housing conditions have an impact on household health, two groups of people were studied: the first made up of households that have recourse to social services for fuel poverty problems and the second made up of households with use of social services for other reasons. A total of 750 people in 362 dwellings took part in this survey.
The dwellings occupied by households exposed to fuel poverty are often older than those of non-exposed households. In these dwellings, the bathrooms (kitchen, bathroom) are not very well equipped with ventilation openings and, when they exist, they are often blocked in an attempt to conserve a little heat. Mold is found in one in two homes.
Electric heaters are the main method of heating these households: they are therefore more likely to not heat certain rooms (such as bedrooms) and find that it is too cold at home in winter, because the energy bill is too large for their resources. Note that one in two households lives below the poverty line (with incomes below 814 euros).
Four pathologies are more frequent in adults in the group exposed to fuel poverty: chronic bronchitis, osteoarthritis, anxiety or the Depression and the headache. Winter diseases such as colds and tonsillitis, the flu Where the gastro are also more common in these exposed people. Children, on the other hand, suffer more frequently from colds, sore throats or eye irritation.
“The interest of this work combining a health approach and an economic approach could make it possible to assess the additional cost generated by energy poverty in the area of health expenditure and compare this additional cost with the investments which would make it possible to improve the quality of housing” concluded the Abbé Pierre Foundation.
