According to researchers, nuclear radiation from power plant leaks and bomb testing is affecting female birthrate around the world.
In the new study, scientists note that these sort of atmospheric blasts rather than on-the-ground incidents have an impact on birth gender worldwide. Researchers are seeing an increase in the number of baby boys compared to baby girls — and it’s all due to the nuclear age!
Scientists at Helmholtz Zentrum München, Germany, analyzed population data from 1975 to 2007 for the U.S. and 39 European countries. From 1964 to 1975, there was an increase in the number of baby boys versus baby girls, and the same for several countries after 1986.
These statistics led researchers to discover that the atomic bomb tests in the 1960s and 1970s and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, in which the reactor exploded in the Ukraine, could be the reason behind the baby boy boom.
“The closer the country was to Chernobyl, the stronger the effect,” study co-author Hagen Scherb, a biostatistician at the German Research Center for Environmental Health in Munich, tells the Daily Mail. For example, more males were born relative to females in Belarus – the Ukraine’s neighbor – than in France.
The findings, which were primarily based on the Cold War era, determine how gender could be effected by future nuclear disasters. And in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident experts are predicting another baby boy boom could be imminent, especially on the U.S. West Coast.
“We do not know how much radioactivity was emitted through Fukushima and how it will spread throughout the world,” Dr. Scherb said. “Maybe it’s confined to just Japan, but if it gets in the water and the air, it’s possible that we could see a similar effect, especially on the West Coast of America.”
So how does this radiation effect the gender ratio? Dr. Scherb says tests showed that radiation caused damage to the X chromosome in sperm. A human sperm cell contains either an X or Y chromosome, while an egg only has a Y chromosome. An XY combination will become a boy, while an XX combination will be a girl.
So obviously a decrease in the X chromosome would lead to a decrease in the number of females born.
What do you think of this new study, HollyMoms?