Excess Female To Male Births In Canada Linked To Chronic Dioxin Exposure

The release of zillions of chemicals, which have never existed in the natural world, into nature is bound to have negative effects.   All of us, no matter how remote a place we live in , have measurable levels of many of these chemicals in our systems now.  And it isn’t just frogs here and there born with an extra leg or two.   It’s us – we are being affected by our own folly.

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ScienceDaily (Oct. 23, 2007) — Almost 90 Canadian communities have experienced a shift in the normal 51:49 ratio of male to female births, so that more girls than boys are being born, according to two new studies.

James Argo, who headed the research, attributes this so-called “inverted sex ratio” of the residents in those communities to dioxin air pollutants from oil refineries, paper mills, metal smelters and other sources.

The studies analyzed information in the Environmental Quality Database (EQDB), an inventory of pollution sources, cancer data, and other factors developed for Canadian government research on how early exposure to environmental contaminants affects the health of Canadians.

Argo points out that the EQDB enables researchers to pinpoint the location of 126,000 homes relative to any of about 65 air pollution sources-types and the occurrence of cancer among residents of those homes.

Argo focused on air pollutants from those sources and the corresponding incidence of cancer among more than 20,000 residents and 5,000 controls. He identified inverted male sex ratios, sometimes as profound as 46:54 in almost all of the communities.

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