Prenatal alcohol exposure

I was interested in this article because it talked about prenatal alcohol use in a place outside of the United States of America.  It focuses on women in Brazzaville, Congo and pulled from a sample size of 3099 women from 10 prenatal care clinics.  This study is interested with women in Africa because it says that data from Africa is often incomplete.  This study was undertaken in order to obtain some concrete and complete data on the prenatal effects of alcohol use by mothers in a part of the world where health education is still not widespread.  Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) has been found to be a marker for increased risks like maternal mortality, fetal mortality, infant and child mortality, premature births, and morbidity.  Congo has the second highest premature birth rate in the world and the nineteenth highest maternal mortality ratio.  This study found that of its 3099 women sampled, 23% drank during pregnancy.  87.4% of these women reported binge drinking.  Only one in six women stopped drinking after realizing they were pregnant.  The rest continued to use alcohol while knowingly pregnant.  The study states that it had several limitations that stemmed from it being a study done outside the United States.  Unlike in the United States, there is no concrete concept of what one drink is in Brazzaville, which skewed some of the data collected.  It was found that many of the women in this study were in their third trimester and still did not know the full risks of drinking alcohol while being pregnant.  This study closes with a call for more PAE education in Africa, particularly in the Republic of Congo.