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. 2022 Mar 21;17(3):e0265617.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0265617. eCollection 2022.

Droughts and child health in Bangladesh

Kien Le  1 , My Nguyen  1
Affiliations

Droughts and child health in Bangladesh

Kien Le et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

This paper investigates the extent to which in-utero exposure to droughts influences the health outcomes of Bangladeshi children in early childhood. Exploiting the plausibly exogenous deviations of rainfall from the location-specific norms, we find that deficient rainfall during the prenatal period is harmful to child health. Specifically, in-utero exposure to droughts decreases the height-for-age, weight-for-height, and weight-for-age z-scores by 0.10, 0.11, and 0.11 standard deviations among children under five years old, respectively. Our heterogeneity analyses reveal that the adverse health setbacks fall disproportionately on children of disadvantaged backgrounds. Exploring the differential effects by trimesters of exposure, we further show that experiencing droughts during the second and the third trimesters leaves injurious effects on early childhood health.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Geographic distribution of rainfall stations across Bangladesh.
Rainfall stations are illustrated by red diamonds. Residential clusters are in blue dots. The figure is created using ArcMap. The data used to construct the map were obtained from the following open access sources: Data for rainfall stations are from the Global Historical Climatology Network monthly and downloadable from https://ncei.noaa.gov/products/land-based-station/global-historical-climatology-network-monthly. Data for residential clusters are from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey and downloadable from https://dhsprogram.com/data/available-datasets.cfm. The base map layer is from the Database of Global Administrative Areas and downloadable from https://gadm.org/download_country.html.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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Grants and funding

The authors received no specific funding for this work.
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