Similar to cigarette smoke, fumes from cooking oil contain lots of carcinogens such as aromatic amines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), nitro-polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. etc. and are notoriously difficult to remove by traditional static method. In this paper, low temperature catalytic oxidation was employed to treat cooking oil fume. A novel catalyst, based on MnO2/CuO, was developed successfully and its characteristics were studied. Catalytic activity was studied under different oil temperatures, catalyst temperatures and contact times results show that the method employed in this work can give impressive treatment effect on cooking oil fume. Lifetime experiments, poisoning experiments by water steam, and thermal stability study of catalyst were also performed to check the catalyst robustness. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.