Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Gender Bender: Only Girls Being Born In Arctic Village

Really want to have a baby girl? Then I have a great place for you to live. In certain villages in northern Greenland, only baby girls are being born. Not only is this creepy, but its super disturbing as well. Altered sex ratios of population severely hinder the ability of the population to survive. And, this isn't just a problem in the Arctic. The ratio of baby boys to baby girls has been declining in the US and other industrialized countries since the 1970s.

Whats causing this crazy imbalance? I did some digging around, and it turns out that PCBs are one of the main chemicals linked to crazy sex ratios. PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, are a class of yucky chemicals that were banned in the 1970s for being persistent organic pollutants (POPs). They are found to bioaccumulate in people and animals. A study that just came out found that women in San Francisco with high levels of PCBs in their bodies who became pregnant were a third less likely to give birth to a baby boy.

PCBs aren't the only culprit, though: studies have also linked dioxins, methylmercury, air pollution from incinerators, maternal exposure to non-ionizing radiation, paternal exposure to high voltages, paternal occupation, and parental smoking, among other things, to lower birth rates of boys.

Even though we can pat ourselves on the back for having banned PCBs, the fact that altered sex ratios seem to be a growing problem should be a warning that we need to take a hard look at our current system of chemical regulation. There are a ton of chemicals that we are exposed to every day that bioaccumulate in our bodies, and we don't know the effects of them.

2 comments:

Brian said...

This is especially troublesome when you consider the large gay population in San Francisco. The straight women have it hard enough as it is without having more competition.

Big Buddy said...

well said brian, i was going to say the same thing about dc. also, i hear victoria beckham is really itching to have a girl. i really wish she would move to the arctic to get the job done. that would be amazing.