Sludge Watch ==> Mystery of the Missing Boys...

[Maureen Reilly]

Sludgewatch Admin:

Hmmmm.....once Orange County California gets people drinking sewage 
treatment effluent (since they plan to put the effluent into drinking 
aquifer) the rest of us can wait a year of two and see if the number of baby 
boys born in homes and hospitals in Orange County starts to go down.

It may well be that the estrogens and estrogenic compounds in the birth 
control pills, cleaners, surfactants, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals 
discharged into the sewers just don't create a climate favorable to in-utero 
males.
...........................................................


The mystery of the missing boys
by Martin Mittelstaedt, The Globe and Mail April 11, 2007

Where are all the missing boys?

It is a question posed by a new study that has found the proportion of boys 
born over the past three decades has unexpectedly dropped in both the United 
States and Japan. In all, more than a quarter of a million boys are missing, 
compared to what would have been expected had the sex ratio existing in 1970 
remained unchanged.

The study also says the world's most skewed sex ratio is in Canada, in a 
native community surrounded by petrochemical plants in Sarnia, Ont., where 
the number of boys born has plunged since the mid-1990s at a rate never 
seen.

Although the researchers do not know why boys are taking a hit, they suspect 
contributing causes could include widespread exposure to hormone-mimicking 
pollutants by women during pregnancy and by men before they help conceive 
children.

"We hypothesize that the decline in sex ratio in industrial countries may be 
due, in part, to prenatal exposure to metalloestrogens and other endocrine 
disrupting chemicals," said the study, issued this week in Environmental 
Health Perspectives, a peer reviewed journal of the U.S. National Institute 
of Environmental Health Sciences.

These types of chemicals include some pesticides, dioxin and methylmercury, 
a pollutant from coal-fired power plants and many industrial sources 
commonly found in seafood.

The study also flagged a host of other possible factors, including rising 
obesity rates, older parental age, growing stress levels, and the increasing 
number of children being conceived using fertility aides. Other research has 
shown some associations between these factors and a drop in boy births.

The study was conducted by researchers in both the U.S. and Japan, and led 
by Devra Lee Davis, a prominent epidemiologist and director of the Center 
for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.

In an interview, Dr. Davis said that although the cause of the decline isn't 
known, it could be linked to the increasing number of other male 
reproductive problems, such as falling sperm counts and rising testicular 
cancer rates.

She said that males during fetal development may be more sensitive to 
pollutants that mimic hormones, leading to increased fetal deaths and 
reproductive problems later for the surviving males.

The situation in Sarnia, where nearly twice as many girls are being born 
than boys on the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, is internationally significant, 
according to the study. "To our knowledge, this is a more significantly 
reduced sex ratio and greater rate of change than has been reported 
previously anywhere," it said.

The reserve is located in the heart of Sarnia's chemical valley, and the 
native community, along with researchers at the University of Rochester and 
the Occupational Health Clinics for Ontario Workers, are trying to find the 
cause of the unusual sex ratio.

Fewer boys than expected are being born in the non-aboriginal community 
downwind of the petrochemical plants in the area, but not to the same degree 
as on the reserve. The work force in Sarnia has not been studied, something 
that would shed light on whether pollutants are the cause.

Researchers in many countries have been reporting a drop in the ratio of 
boys to girls being born over the past few decades.

It is considered normal in a large population for the number of baby boys to 
slightly outnumber girls, by a proportion of about 105 males to 100 females. 
It is widely thought that more boy births are a way nature compensates for 
higher rates of male mortality.

But the ratio has not been static in industrialized countries, and 
researchers suspect that increasing numbers of male fetuses are being 
miscarried, a kind of sex-based culling in the womb.

In Japan, the sex ratio fluctuated with no trend from 1949 to 1970, but then 
declined steadily to 1999, the end of the study period there.

The decline in the number of boys in Japan equals 37 out of every 10,000 
births.

In the U.S., the sex ratio also declined from 1970 to 2002. The drop in the 
number of boys equals 17 out of every 10,000 births.

The U.S. change was concentrated among whites. There was almost no change 
among blacks.