Gratuitous Domestic Posting (TM) - Scientific Inquiry Division

Robbo Llama - not just a father, a statistic!

A study published in this week's online edition of Environmental Health Perspectives reports that during the past thirty years, the number of male births has decreased each year in the U.S. and Japan. In a review of all births in both countries, the University of Pittsburgh-led study found significantly fewer boys being born relative to girls in the U.S. and Japan, and that an increasing proportion of fetuses that die are male. They note that the decline in births is equivalent to 135,000 fewer white males in the U.S. and 127,000 fewer males in Japan over the past three decades and suggest that environmental factors are one explanation for these trends.

"The pattern of decline in the ratio of male to female births remains largely unexplained," said Devra Lee Davis, Ph.D., M.P.H., lead investigator of the study, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute's Center for Environmental Oncology and professor of epidemiology, University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. "We know that men who work with some solvents, metals and pesticides father fewer baby boys. We also know that nutritional factors, physical health and chemical exposures of pregnant women affect their ability to have children and the health of their offspring. We suspect that some combination of these factors, along with older age of parents, may account for decreasing male births."

Uh, oh - it looks like all those model airplane cement fumes I inhaled as a loner teenager have come back to haunt me.

It is an oddity though - including my sister, the ratio of males to females in the four or five generations of my line up to my own has been something like 10 to 1. However, my brother and I between us have produced five daughters and just one son. (My sister has a daughter too, although that wouldn't count here.)

When the eldest Llama-ette was born, we were positively gob-smacked, having just assumed she would be a boy. By the time the third Llama-ette came along, I was over any such surprise, realizing by then that God was simply granting the wish I had cherished during all those loner teenaged years that I could someday be one of those guys surrounded by fabulous babes.

Lesson: Be very careful what you wish for.

Yips! to Dean.