Researchers from Lancaster University and the FIOCRUZ health research institute in Brazil found babies born to mothers exposed to extreme rainfall shocks, were smaller due to restricted foetal growth and premature birth.
Low birth-weight has life-long consequences for health and development and researchers say their findings are evidence of climate extremes causing intergenerational disadvantage, especially for socially-marginalized Amazonians in forgotten places.
Climate extremes can affect the health of mothers and their unborn babies in many ways – for example causing crops to fail, reducing access to nutritious affordable food, increasing prevalence of infectious diseases. Extremely intense rainfall in Amazonia causes river flooding exposing poorer households to water-borne diseases and creating ideal breeding conditions for mosquitos, leading to outbreaks of malaria or dengue fever. Major floods and droughts are extremely disruptive to people’s lives; related stress and anxiety can contribute to premature birth and impair normal childhood development.
The team focused on all the live births over an 11-year period in 43 highly river-dependent municipalities in Amazonas State, Brazil. For these 291,479 births they analysed how birth-weight, foetal growth and pregnancy duration were affected by local rainfall variability during pregnancy.
Extremely intense rainfall in Amazonia was associated with severely reduced mean birth-weight due to pre-term birth or restricted growth - average birth-weight reduction was nearly 200 grams.
