Sanitation & Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes

About

The last in a series of five SHARE-funded studies, this Asian Institute of Public Health-led population-based cohort study in Odisha, India, assessed the effect of poor sanitation during pregnancy on adverse pregnancy outcomes (APO). 

It found that poor sanitation in general, and open defecation in particular, were strongly associated with APO after adjusting for a broad range of biological and socio-economic factors (Padhi et al., 2015). This is the first rigorous epidemiological study to demonstrate this relationship and the results have potentially important implications for maternal and newborn health policy in high burden settings.