Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Publication

The impacts of natural disasters on breastfeeding practices: A systematic scoping review

Citations
Abstract
Background: Understanding barriers and facilitators to breastfeeding practices in areas impacted by natural disasters can help humanitarian aid organizations make changes to the way they provide resources during crises. This review aims to assess the impacts of natural disasters on women’s breastfeeding practices. Methods: PubMed was searched on February 19, 2025 for primary studies looking at the impact of a natural disaster directly on women’s breastfeeding practices globally. The results were narratively synthesized and grouped by natural disaster type and outcome. Results: 10 studies were included in this review with 11 papers, with one reporting on the same event. Included studies all focused on barriers and facilitators of breastfeeding. Overall, the included studies represented 1,400 participants. Study size ranged from 6 to 897 participants. All studies were conducted outside of the United States, with two being in Turkey, and the rest from Iran, Italy, India, Haiti, Nepal, Canada, and Pakistan. Natural disaster types in this review included earthquakes, floods, a tsunami, and a wildfire. In the aftermath of a natural disaster, common barriers to breastfeeding practices were lack of privacy for breastfeeding, stress/anxiety, nutrition and low food consumption, cultural beliefs, and shelter. Nutrition and low food consumption as well as mental health stressors both, in some cases, reduced breast milk production. Humanitarian aid acted as a barrier to some and a facilitator to others, depending on the circumstances. Facilitators of breastfeeding were more sparse in the literature, but themes were religion and cultural breastfeeding norms, aid, privacy, and sense of community among other women. Only one study had breastfeeding practices assessed at more than one time after the natural disaster. Discussion: Further research should be done assessing breastfeeding practices at multiple points in time. These papers presented information about displaced populations and it would be interesting to see future research on non-displaced populations. Humanitarian interventions were sometimes inconsistent with the needs of the displaced mothers pointing to the need for further refinements to encourage breastfeeding practices during natural disasters.
Type
Capstone Project
Date
2025-05
Publisher
License
Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Embargo Lift Date
Publisher Version
Embedded videos
Collections
Related Item(s)