The bizarre link between rising sea levels and complications in pregnancy

The trend is made worse by the region’s growing shrimp and prawn industry. Black tiger shrimp, the main species of shrimp farmed in Bangladesh, thrive in brackish water — water that is saline but not quite as salty as seawater. When Satkhira began to embrace aquaculture and shrimp farming, the government neglected to study the potential risks of adding saline to freshwater ponds in order to make them suitable for shrimp farming. Over time, salt from the shrimp fields leached into ponds and other in-ground freshwater containers, further contaminating limited drinking water supplies. A 2019 report that tested salinity in 57 freshwater ponds in Satkhira found that 41 of them contained water that was too salty for drinking.

The Padma River, which carries fresh water from Nepal through India to Bangladesh, is another source of salinity. The river supplies much of the fresh water Bangladeshis use for irrigation, farming, freshwater fishing, and drinking. But the Padma’s flow into Bangladesh is restricted seasonally by India, which controls a dam in West Bengal called the Farakka Barrage. During dry periods, the flow of water coming into Bangladesh from India slows and the volume of river water going into the ocean weakens, allowing seawater to work its way up the Padma. When heavy rain falls, the river swells and salt water is pushed back out, expunging the river of its salinity and transforming the river back into a freshwater resource.

Families collect rainwater during the winter to use throughout the dry season, but climate change is scrambling those delicate calculations, too. The seasonal rains start later and stop earlier than they did a decade ago, and when it does rain, it rains harder. These compounding issues force Bangladeshis to pull more fresh water from groundwater aquifers, which are rapidly dwindling.

“The people are trapped,” said Zion Bodrud-Doza, a researcher at the University of Guelph in Canada who studies saltwater intrusion in Bangladesh. “When you don’t have water to drink, how do you live?”

In 2008, Aneire Khan, a researcher at Imperial College London, visited Dacope, a division of the Khulna district, which borders Satkhira in southwest Bangladesh. She met a gynecologist there who told her that an unusual number of pregnant women were coming to him with gestational hypertension and preeclampsia.

The former is defined as two separate blood pressure readings of greater than 140 over 90 in the second half of the pregnancy. The latter occurs when those high blood pressure readings are accompanied by high levels of protein in the urine.

Both conditions affect how the placenta develops and embeds into the uterine wall, said Tracy Caroline Bank, a maternal fetal medicine fellow physician at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Patients with either condition “have a higher risk of things like a preterm delivery, of fetal loss,” she said, in addition to “a higher risk of the baby growing too small.” Premature babies are dealt a bad hand before they take their first breaths: Low birth weights are linked to poor development, cognitive impairments, cerebral palsy, and psychological disorders.

The gynecologist Khan spoke to said that high blood pressure readings, especially in women, were occurring with more frequency. Other medical professionals Khan spoke to in Khulna confirmed that observation. They thought salt water may be the culprit.