International Birth Defects Day is celebrated on March 3. The date was chosen by the scientific community to highlight these anomalies – among them, rare defects such as microcephaly or frequent defects such as facial clefts or a set of skeletal dysplasias – which can affect any child in the world, regardless of their ethnic origin or birthplace. “Around 3% to 6% of children around the world are born with some congenital defect, some malformation. In Brazil, the estimate is that 87 thousand children are born each year with some developmental defect and many of them are preventable”, explains Denise Cavalcanti, medical geneticist and professor at the Department of Medical Genetics at the Faculty of Medical Sciences (FCM) at Unicamp.
Read more on the FCM page
