[Pharmwaste] Are Boys An Endangered Species?

[DeBiasi,Deborah]

Are Boys An Endangered Species?

By Francesca Lyman for MSN Health & Fitness
Freelance


Half as many boys as girls are being born in some places around the
world-and pollution is the prime suspect.

Among the Chippewas of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation community living on
the shores of the St. Clair River outside Sarnia, Ontario, tribal
leaders were puzzling over a variety of health problems-from asthma to
cancer to miscarriages-plaguing their families. The Aamjiwnaang-the name
means "at the spawning stream"-were shaken when they realized that there
was a dramatic disproportion of girls to boys among them. 

Jim Brophy, director of the Occupational Health Clinic for Ontario
Workers' Sarnia branch, remembers the look of shock on their faces when
they suddenly made the connection. "It was like a deep family secret
getting out," Brophy recalls. "They had enough girls for three baseball
teams, but not enough boys for even one boy team." 

Since then, the Chippewas of Aamjiwnaang's 850 band members-who live
near a cluster of chemical plants known as Chemical Valley-have worried
that the air and water around them contribute to the drop in the number
of their male children, as well as a host of grim diseases associated
with toxic chemicals.

And now, in a number of villages at the northernmost reaches of the
Arctic Circle-seemingly remote from any hazardous chemicals-scientists
have found a similar syndrome: populations spawning twice as many girls
as boys. Based on preliminary data released in September 2007,
researchers are blaming high levels of man-made chemicals that have made
their way up the food chain, through fish and other marine species, and
into indigenous seafood diets.  

Indigenous Arctic peoples show high levels of chemical contamination,
researchers say, because they depend on local fish, marine animals,
seabirds and reindeer meat, which are significantly more contaminated
than imported food by persistent organic pollutants like PCBs, dioxin
and DDT.

So far, researchers from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme
have linked the dramatically skewed declines in male baby births with
chemical contamination. But they haven't determined the exact biological
mechanisms by which these changes are taking place.

However, according to Lars-Otto Reiersen, executive secretary of AMAP in
Oslo, Norway, "PCBs, DDTs and other persistent organic pollutants are
known from research to possibly trigger male and female hormone signals
incorrectly." 

These strange and disturbing cases are by no means the only ones
providing clues that there can be changes to the sex ratio-the normal,
and usually fairly even, proportion of male to female live births. One
of the first examples of this phenomenon came when thousands of people
were contaminated by dioxin in a 1976 industrial accident at a chemical
factory in Seveso, Italy. After the accident, researchers followed the
children of the people affected to discover that half the number of boys
as girls were born in the next generation. 

Lars-Otto Reiersen and other Arctic researchers fear the same thing
could be happening in the Russian Arctic.  "Arctic indigenous
populations, whose lifestyle is based on the consumption of traditional
country foods, are subject to some of the highest exposure levels to PTS
(persistent toxic substances) of any population groups on Earth,"
according to the AMAP report.

Also alarming is the decline in male births around the world, a trend
some scientists find troubling. In the United States, more boys are
being born than girls, but the gap between the two has declined in the
last 30 years.


One of those worried is Devra Davis, director of the University of
Pittsburgh Cancer Institute's Center for Environmental Oncology and
professor of epidemiology at the university's Graduate School of Public
Health. Davis is the lead author of a June 2007 article in the journal
Environmental Health Perspectives that found statistically significant
reductions in male births and increased fetal deaths in Japan and among
Caucasians in the United States since 1970. She and her co-authors note
that this decline represents 135,000 fewer white males in the U.S. and
127,000 fewer males in Japan stretching over the past three decades than
the normative rate would expect.

"There are environmental and other factors-probably not genetics,
because such changes couldn't happen in a decade or two-working to
threaten the ability of the human species to make healthy babies," Davis
told MSN. 

Most parents think their chance of having a baby girl or a baby boy is
50-50. However, normally, it's more like 51-49, since on average there
are 105 or 106 males born for every 100 females. 

Throughout history, males have usually outnumbered females slightly,
according to Christopher Wills, a Professor of Biological Sciences at
the University of California, San Diego.  Nature, or evolution,
compensates for the fact that males are more fragile by producing more
of them, Wills says, "so that the ratio of males to females is about 1.2
to 1 at conception."

Given this natural tilt toward male births, the declining probability of
having a male baby is ever more troubling to Davis; it's what she
considers a "sentinel" indicator of ill health in the
population-indicating, as she and her co-authors wrote, that "males are
being culled in some systematic fashion."

Davis and the University of Pittsburgh team also found that an
increasing proportion of fetuses that die are male.  They say a range of
environmental factors may explain these trends: whether they originate
in paternal exposures or maternal exposures before conception-possibly,
as they write, "prenatal exposures to endocrine disrupting environmental
pollutants at a critical stage of sexual differentiation."

However, the reasons behind these trends aren't clear. "Normally, many
more boys than girls should be born," Davis told MSN, "and they aren't
being born. Something is obviously wrong, but we don't know how to
explain this." 

Not everyone agrees that the small decline these researchers point to is
so consequential. 

The American Chemistry Council, which represents U.S. chemical
manufacturers, won't discuss these statistics, but refers reporters to
Dr. Harry Fisch, a longtime researcher on male reproductive health who
dismisses the idea that these global trends are being triggered by
endocrine-disrupting chemicals. [Fisch says he is not affiliated with
the ACC or a paid consultant to the organization, although he has
accepted several reimbursements for travel expenses from ACC to
international meetings to discuss his own independently-funded
research].

"Over the years, there have been major fluctuations," says Fisch, a
professor of urology at Columbia University, College of Physicians and
Surgeons, "True, there are less boys being born compared to girls,
during the last few decades, but only fractionally."   

Fisch, author of The Male Biological Clock, blames older parental age as
a more likely explanation than pollution for some of these unexplained
trends like skewed sex ratio, noting that a recent Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention study found that older mothers and older fathers
tended to produce fewer boys. "Before you start saying that chemicals in
our global environment are the culprit, you have to look at your own
personal environment," he adds. "The bottom line is that we're seeing a
trend toward older parents."

Fisch also dismisses worries over a drop in sperm counts and increases
in hypospadias, and argues that the neurodevelopmental problems
affecting boys-the sixfold increase in autism, for example-can be
attributed to more people having children at older ages, not
environmental chemicals. 

However, many public health professionals argue the opposite: That drops
in male births and general declines in reproductive health ought to be
examined even more closely in connection with endocrine disruption.

"This is a very serious issue that speaks to our future reproductive
health," argues OHCOW's Jim Brophy. "We tend to look at chronic
diseases, like cancer and autism, in isolation, while these reproductive
issues-higher rates of miscarriage, for example-tend to go below the
radar and may offer clues for the huge rates of diseases we're seeing."

Population biologist Christopher Wills offers another concern connected
with the greater fragility of males: It isn't just that males are being
born in lesser numbers, but that their lives are being foreshortened,
especially in places hit hard by pollution. 

"Just look at the life expectancy for men in Russia-it's age 73 for
women, but age 59 for men,' says Wills. "This may turn out to be the
real elephant in the bedroom."

Francesca Lyman is the author of several environmental books, including
The Greenhouse T rap and Inside the Dzanga-Sangha Rain Forest. Her work
has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Ms. Magazine,
Seattle Metropolitan, MSNBC Online, This Old House, and Horizon Air
magazines.

URL:
http://health.msn.com/pregnancykids/pregnancy/articlepage.aspx?cp-docume
ntid=100171768

Deborah L. DeBiasi
Email:   dldebiasi at deq.virginia.gov
WEB site address:  www.deq.virginia.gov
Virginia Department of Environmental Quality
Office of Water Permit Programs
Industrial Pretreatment/Toxics Management Program
Mail:          P.O. Box 1105, Richmond, VA  23218 (NEW!)
Location:  629 E. Main Street, Richmond, VA  23219
PH:         804-698-4028
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