BC Wildfire Study Project Coordinator explains eligibility criteria, consent requirements

FORT ST. JOHN, B.C. — The Project Coordinator behind the BC Wildfire Study has shared information on the kind of data her research team needs from participants.

According to Smruthi Ramachandran, the study – a collaboration between the University of British Columbia and the BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute – is meant to assess “how exposure to wildfires while children are in utero might influence their health and development growing up.”

“Participation does involve a couple more things beyond the [online] survey,” Ramachandran says. 

“When they sign the consent form, particiapnts will have to consent for us to access their child’s newborn blood spots. Basically, any child who’s born in BC will get their blood collected at the hospital, so they’d just need to consent for us to access that sample from the hospital.”

Ramachandran says participants will also need to consent to something called “data linkage,” meaning they’d give the research team behind the study permission to access health records through government databases.

“[With data linkage], we can look into information such as the child and the mom’s health and respiratorial conditions, and the number of times they’ve had to go to the hospital, to kind of understand better how their health has been since the child was born.”

Ramachandran says any “biological mother of a child” who was pregnant and gave birth in BC between 2016 and 2023 is eligible to take part in the study.

However, she says there are some exceptions: specifically, if the child they were pregnant with in that time frame ended up being a twin or triplet, they can’t take part.

Parents unable to share information regarding where their child has lived since birth are also ineligible, she says.

The survey is expected to take roughly 90 minutes to fill out. Interested parents can view the flyer below for more information and a link to an eligibility screening survey.