Public Release: 8-Aug-2017
George Washington University
WASHINGTON, DC (Aug. 8, 2017) — Pregnant women are an important but thus far largely overlooked group vulnerable to the effects of extreme heat linked to climate change, according to new research by Sabrina McCormick, PhD, an Associate Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health at Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University.
“Expecting mothers are an important group whose unique vulnerability to heat stress should be factored into public health policy,” says McCormick, who has been studying the impacts of climate change on human health for over a decade, and served as the lead author on the Special Assessment of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Exposure to extreme heat can harm both pregnant mothers and their babies, especially in situations where the expectant mother has limited access to prenatal care.”
McCormick and Leeann Kuehn, a recent GW MPH alumna concurrently studying to be a physician’s assistant, conducted the most extensive systematic review to date of research articles that identify how heat-related exposures result in adverse health effects for pregnant women. They followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guide to identify and systematically review articles from PubMed and Cochrane Reviews on climate change-related exposures and adverse health effects for pregnant women.
The studies that McCormick and Kuehn identified provide evidence that exposure to temperature extremes can adversely impact birth outcomes, including changes in length of gestation, birth weight, stillbirth, and neonatal stress during unusually hot temperatures.
“Our study indicates that there is a need for further research on the ways that climate change, and heat in particular, affect maternal health and neonatal outcomes,” McCormick says. “The research also shows that uniform standards for assessing the effects of heat on maternal fetal health need to be established.”
“Heat Exposure and Maternal Health in the Face of Climate Change” is published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
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About Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University: Established in July 1997 as the School of Public Health and Health Services, Milken Institute School of Public Health is the only school of public health in the nation’s capital. Today, more than 1,900 students from 54 U.S. states and territories and more than 50 countries pursue undergraduate, graduate and doctoral-level degrees in public health. The school also offers an online Master of Public Health, MPH@GW, an online Executive Master of Health Administration, MHA@GW, and an online Master of Science in Management of Health Informatics and Analytics, HealthInformatics@GW, which allow students to pursue their degree from anywhere in the world.
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Global warming with the ‘unprecedented’ CO2 levels is causing the evolution explosion last seen at the dawn of dinosaur’s era.
Rattus Rex was found by gas engineer Tony Smith near a playground in the Hackney Downs area of London.
/sarc
Mothers in Sydney & Melbourne need not worry. Alarmist officials are screaming about extreme heat, while the official BOM figures here show that there is NO INCREASE in the number of hot days over the last 117 years.
Where is that extreme heat? In the minds of sick people, it seems.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/century_days_sydmelb.jpg
“The studies that McCormick and Kuehn identified provide evidence that exposure to temperature extremes can adversely impact birth outcomes, including changes in length of gestation, birth weight, stillbirth, and neonatal stress during unusually hot temperatures.”
That’s why the birth rates are so low in the tropical heat soaked third world…..
“Where is that extreme heat? In the minds of sick people, it seems.”
Actually, your closer to the truth than you realize.
I posit that the modern world over-sensitizes people to weather.
Modern first world people live in air conditioned homes where they enter their air conditioned vehicles in the garage drive to the workplace where the park in the underground cool parkade for the short walk to the elevator and ride up to the climate controlled office for the workday.
The instant they step outside on a hot summer day it feels abnormal and thus they are easily duped into believing the real state of affairs is in disorder.
In the past folks lived and worked submerged in the reality of the daily weather, the change in conditions from outside to inside varied little, with the exception of winter where “coal fired” warmth saved life and limb from a horrible death. Heat was seldom a problem as bodies adjusted with the changing seasons, any ancestor would be astounded by the stupidity of modern “climate science”.
Tell that to the women who are producing the mist babies…poor peasant women in tropical regions.
Highest fertility rate in the world. Traditional diseases that could have been eradicated by pesticides were blocked by greens, UN ….. These people were left with this problem. It has nothing to do with the heat. I’ve seen women in Africa working in the fields in the sahel go to the shade of a tree to deliver their own babies, clean it up, wrap it up and tie it on their back and get back to work after a rest. No shrinking millennium violets these gals. They could do with a lot more cheap energy to lighten the burdens on their lives, though – guess who stops this?
Estimated top temperature today in one of the French wine producing regions, Alsace, +17 C.
The anxieties of expecting mothers must have been alleviated by frost a couple of months ago, the hail last weekend, Macron government’s plans to inflate local energy prices and the prospect of arriving to the hospital by bus once the time comes.
Forgot to mention the relief provided by July skiing holidays in the pristine and voluptuous snow on the Alps.
Diaper rash is more deadly than frost bite…
Well, we better get to building some coal fired power plants in order to provide air conditioners to women who need it.
In Norway: ‘Coldest july in 17 years’……
In southern Europe a heat wave reached 43C in the shade over a wide area.
Cities are up to 20 degrees hotter than the surrounding countryside and as far as i know pregnancies have not been effected. The populations of cities continues to grow.
This is a fascinating misunderstanding. Correlation is not causation – cities do not grow by births. Yes births happen but I don’t think there are any major cities outside Africa that are growing due to a birth rate above break even. Instead in the countryside birthrates tend to be higher than break even, and then people move to the city. New York has had a birth rate far below what is needed for a stable population since the 1970’s and yet the population has grown.
Let us know when that “exteme heat” will show up to hurt those poor pregnant women.
We must assume that pregnant women who live in the tropics (and lack air conditioning) are already being hurt and have been for a millenia. So why no concern over those billions affected now
but concern for non-existent women facing non-existent heat in the next century? And why the belief that global warming will ever start up again? Plenty of questions, not much in the way of answers.
Notice that these “studies” NEVER look at the harm of cold weather. This is a perfect example of the extreme bias in current climate “research” (if one can call it that). Cold weather kills far more than warm weather. Global warming would be a big help in reducing cold weather mortality rates.
C’mon global warming!! Where are you, global warming? Someone go ask Al Gore, climate expert, about this.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/08/09/us-climate-report-edits-out-highly-embarrassing-section/
You can worry about pregnant women if you want, but I intend to keep the focus on the REAL vulnerable ones, our precious exploding CIS/Trans lesbian glaciers. These poor victims deserve a larger chunk of the funding pie, distributed fairly, of course to only CIS/Trans lesbian studies researchers.
Wait, what about kittens and puppies? Aren’t they also “vulnerable to the effects of extreme heat linked to climate change”? Won’t someone please think of the kittens and puppies?
Never mind basic public health expenditures in clean water, waste systems, and mosquito control, when political propaganda is the new priority.
S’Truth, when is this sciencey nightmare going to end! And co authored by a lady that’s going to be a physician’s assistant (used to be a called a nurse.) I was born during the hottest period in N. America a long time ago. The family talked about those times for a decade or more afterwards and there was no A/C in hospitals or anywhere else. Almost 30 yrs later, I was in postage stamp sized Northern Nigeria, the most populous place in Africa just south of the Sahara where two clinical thermometers I had brought with me blew up in my luggage (turns out you need more robust thermometers in equatorial places). Nigeria’s citizens had no trouble with fertility and the country had 25 million people then and triple that today despite grievous global warming.
So,, this man-caused catastrophe of too many humans will take care of itself, then. Sounds natural. Wouldn’t want to interfere.
It is my fondest hope that these research papers are being written solely for the acquisition of grant money and for the sake of publishing, and that in no way, shape or form do the authors belief what they are writing. It would break my heart to think that college graduates these days have no ability for rational thought.
What do you expect when so many professors have no ability for rational thought? I’ve already warned my 10-year old son that, when he goes to college, he’d better avoid one of those majors where you come out dumber than when you went in.
Yet another opportunity to apply the Maine – Florida test! Fertility rate in Florida which averages several tens of degrees warmer than Maine, is 1.77. Fertility rate in Maine is 1.64. Hmm. Clearly more data “homogenization” is needed.
Just curious – are these women pregnant because of the increased rape caused by Climate Change or because Climate Change forced them into prostitution?
More smoke and mirrors to hide the Elephant(s) in the room. Western populations are shrinking. Healthy sperm counts in Western men is way down (according to a meta-study, for what it’s worth) ~60% since 1970. Western society has become toxic to Western peoples.
Yeah, I’ve offered to help re the sperm count problem. So far, no takers.
From this climate/hardiness zone map you can see that 2 °C of warming is roughly equivalent to moving about 100 miles south, in the United States:
http://sealevel.info/zones-2015-with-scale.png
So if global warming kicks in and warms the U.S. climate by 2 °C, then anyone pregnant in the USA should immediately move 100 miles north, thereby lowering the temperatures she must endure by about 2 °C.
Or she could relocate to an elevation about 1000 feet higher, for similar effect.
Or some combination: e.g., move 50 miles north and to a 500′ higher elevation.
/sarc
Okay, that was sarcasm (except for the zone map — that was real). This isn’t: As most folks here at WUWT know, but Dr. McCormick apparently doesn’t, “global warming” is not actually expected to be very “global.” It won’t cause much increase in “extreme heat.” Instead, it is expected to disproportionately increase nighttime/winter lows at high latitudes (they call that “polar amplification”).
The tropics aren’t warming much, and aren’t expected to, That’s nice, because they’re already warm enough. Instead, most of the “global warming” is making brutal climates at extreme latitudes a little bit less harsh.
That’s very good news! Dr. McCormick might not have mentioned it, but extreme anything is rough on pregnant women, and that includes extreme cold as well as extreme heat.
It also includes extreme hunger. Being hungry is very, very bad for pregnant women and their babies. Anthropogenic CO2 is helping to mitigate that problem. An estimated 15-20% of current agricultural production is a direct result of the “fertilization” effect of current higher CO2 levels.
The benefits of higher CO2 levels to plants have been known to science for a century. This photo is from a 1920 article in Scientific American magazine:
http://sealevel.info/SciAm_1920_CO2_fertilized_cauliflower.png
Higher CO2 levels not only make most plants grow better, they also make most plants more drought resistant. Additionally, the greenhouse effect is expected to accelerate the hydrological cycle, which may reduce droughts.
The combined result is that the Earth is “greening,” especially in arid areas, like the Sahel.
Even wildly alarmist National Geographic has noticed, though they couldn’t quite bring themselves to admit it’s the CO2 that’s responsible:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html
Here’s an excerpt:
Well since Dr. Marohasy in oz took on the BOM temperature “incident”, their stalled drop into La Nina territory on the Enso temperature plot fell like a stone. I believe the Dreaded Pause has returned as is set to stretch back int the mid 1990s despite Karlization and endless rounds of jiggering caused by built in algorithms. Recall Mark Steyn’s famous remark at the Senate hearing on climate data and projections. Paraphrasing, he said how can we be so certain what the temperature is in 2100 when we still can projecft what the temperature in 1950 WILL be!!. Global warming isn’t going to withstand this this final La Nina coup de grace. I will be necessary to CLICK ON THE GRAPHIC to get the updated version of the BOM ENSO graph:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/monitoring/nino3_4.png
Also with all the cooling reported in N. America, Europe Siberia, Australia How ’bout that big summer snowfall in Iceland recently!
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/09/extreme-heat-linked-to-climate-change-may-adversely-affect-pregnancy/
– add in the cooling in South America. Here is a snow scene in Argentina that the MSM ‘failed’ to pick up:
aRGENTINA:
http://www.powderquest.com/snow-report-bariloche-cerro-catedral-july-17-2015/
It’s worse than they thought…I was born in early August in PA, so that clearly indicates that global warming is going to cause an increase in the, you know, ‘den!er types’.
Better be careful in what you write. Given the propensity of climate scientists to confuse correlation with causation, they might start to think that “den!er types” cause global warming, and then we’d all be running for the hills.