Effects of Household Use of Biomass Fuel and Kerosene on Birth Weight of Babies in the Philippines

Year: 2014       Vol.: 63       No.: 1      

Authors: Michael Daniel C. Lucagbo

Abstract:

Birth weight is an important indicator of a child’s health status. It is a significant factor of his or her risk of mortality and morbidity. Infants with low birth weight have been shown to be 40 times more likely to die within the first 28 days of birth than normal birth weight infants. Moreover, low birth weight infants exhibit a much higher incidence of neurological impairment, gross and fine motor dysfunction and developmental delay. Instead of going down to reduce the incidence of child mortality (which is one of the Millennium Development Goals), the incidence of low birth weight in the Philippines has gone the opposite direction: rising from 20.3% in 2003 to 21.2% in 2008. This paper tackles the very serious issue of birth weight using data from the 2008 National Demographic and Health Survey (NDHS), and focuses on one important risk factor: type of cooking fuel used in the household. Using the ordinal logistic regression model, the study establishes that the use of dirty cooking fuel (biomass fuel or kerosene) for daily use of cooking and heating is a significant environmental risk factor of low birth weight. Moreover, the results also show that maternal smoking is significantly associated with the size of the child at birth. Other demographic factors that may be associated with low birth weight are examined as well. Information about the effect cooking fuel on birth weight should lead the government and policymakers to make clean cooking fuel available to Philippine households at a cheap cost.

Keywords: Low birth weight, biomass fuel, maternal smoking, ordinal logistic regression

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