Wildfire research: UC Davis seeking women who were pregnant during or after blazes

Researchers at UC Davis are asking women who were pregnant during or after the Northern California wildfires in October to participate in a study exploring the effects of the fires on their prenatal and postnatal health.

The study, called the BioSpecimen Assessment of Fire Effects study, or B-SAFE, is funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences through the UC Davis Environmental Health Services Center.

Officials will collect and test blood, hair and breast milk from women, and placenta, umbilical cord, saliva and blood samples from their babies to determine if there are any toxic exposures from smoke or ash from the fires, according to UC Davis officials.

“Very little is known about how wildfires impact the health of women and their babies who were exposed during pregnancy,” said investigator Rebecca Schmidt, assistant professor of public health and sciences at UC Davis.

Her team of researchers will visit participants up to three times over the course of the study to collect samples.

Researchers are searching for women who have been living or working in Butte, Lake, Mendocino, Napa, Nevada, Solano, Sonoma or Yuba counties when the fires hit in October.

Participants must be at least 18 years old, be able to understand and write in English, and be pregnant with an expected due date of no later than Oct. 31, or a new mom who was pregnant at the time of the fires.

The research team said it plans on expanding the study to include Spanish-speaking mothers at some point.

“Our goal is to gather mothers with fire-affected pregnancies who want to help us understand what they were exposed to and the biological effects of those exposures on them and their children,” Schmidt said.

For more information, email hs-bsafe@ucdavis.edu or call 916-703-0228.