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Are Boys an Endangered Species?

By Francesca Lyman for MSN Health & Fitness
Excerpted from MSN Health & Fitness:  http://health.msn.com/pregnancykids/greenarticlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100171768&GT1=10547

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. read more...

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