Japan admits 3 reactors melted down. How will the nuclear radiation affect our families?
This week, Japan confirmed that three of the four reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant experienced full meltdowns after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami there. Trace amounts of radiation have already been found in milk from Washington State and California. And now, a new study warns of another side-effect that hadn't even crossed our minds: In the past, fewer baby girls have been born world-wide because of nuclear radiation from power-plant leaks and bomb tests.
Not just hundreds fewer. Millions fewer. Could enough radiation spread from Japan to the United States to affect parents over here?
Left to nature's own devices, males naturally outnumber females by a little more than 5 percent, so for every 1,000 girls born, there are about 1,056 boys. In countries where sex-selective abortion is practiced, though, boys outnumber girls by a greater margin, leading to a lack of potential mates when young men are ready to marry. (The latest census data from India shows that, in some areas, there are only 866 girls under age 7 for every 1,000 boys in that age group. Last year, China found that it had 24 million more men than women, thanks to their "One Child" policy.)
Scientists at Helmholtz Zentrum München, Germany, analyzed data from 1975 to 2007 for 40 countries, including the United States, and found that the number of births of female children dropped between 1964 and 1975 around the world; they attribute the decline to atomic testing in the early 1960s. In 1987, a year after the Chernobyl disaster, the number of female births dipped again, but only in Europe (the United States was farther away and less affected by the radiation).
"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, told the Daily Mail.
People didn't have to live in a fallout zone to be affected, either: The study found that people living within 22 miles of nuclear plants in Germany and Switzerland also gave birth to more boys than girls.
The reason has little to do with survival of the fittest, and more to do with genetic mutation. Animal testing has found that radiation can damage the X chromosome in sperm, leaving more Y-chromosome bearing sperm available to fertilize the mother's eggs (which always contain an X chromosome). More Y-chromosome sperm equals more boys (the result of a XY egg-sperm pairing) than girls (XX).
But it's possible that the drop in female births may have to do with location rather than radiation. Bizarrely, women who live close to the equator tend to give birth to more girls than boys, another study found. And an Italian study showed that couples are more likely to conceive a boy in the fall and a girl in the spring-possibly because of a hardwired reaction to the seasons and the availability of food.
But the spread of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is raises plenty of cause for alarm. A West Coast boy baby boom could be on the horizon. "We do not know how much radioactivity was emitted through Fukushima and how it will spread throughout the world," Dr. Scherb said in an interview with The Daily Mail. "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."
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