Hormones & Pthalates

[Guest guest]

[Note: I did not include the url for this article as it is no longer

available.]

 

Singing starlings and why thousands of babies who should have been

boys are being born as girls

By GEOFFREY LEAN

27th February 2008

 

Next time you hear a starling sing, stop and listen hard. It may well

be warning of a peril that endangers the whole world of nature - and

the very future of the human race itself.

 

For scientists have found that gender-bender chemicals - increasingly

contaminating the environment, our food, our water and our bodies -

are having a bizarre effect on common birds, causing the males to

give voice to longer and more complex songs.

 

This is only the latest in a long series of increasingly urgent

alarms being sounded by wildlife against an insidious but devastating

danger that threatens our children.

 

But so far our leaders have steadfastly and scandalously turned a

deaf ear to them - and, even more shamefully, ignored the first signs

that the peril is already affecting birth patterns, causing thousands

of babies who should have been boys to be born as girls instead.

 

Starlings and their diverse, complicated and mimicking - though not

beautiful - songs have long fascinated humanity. Mozart was entranced

by a starling after it copied a tune that the great composer was

whistling in a pet store.

 

Scientists have found that gender-bending chemicals have caused male

starlings to sing longer and more complex songs. Modern scientists

have discovered that starlings' songs contain similar patterns to

human speech.

 

But if we could, indeed, understand what they are communicating, we

would be wise to take heed.

 

Scientists at Cardiff University have discovered that the brains of

male starlings foraging for worms at a sewage treatment works in

South-West England have been subtly changed by being contaminated by

oestrogen from the contraceptive pill and hormone replacement therapy

(HRT).

 

The female hormones - present in women's urine, and passing through

the sewage treatment unaffected - caused the part of the brain that

controls their song to grow much bigger, causing them to sing at

greater length and with even more virtuosity than usual.

 

The study confirms similar, if slightly differing, research on other

birds, which scientists say is adding up to some of the first

concrete proof of the effects of gender benders on the natural world.

 

Researchers at the University of California have found that feeding

female finches with a hormone used in HRT has caused them to sing,

something hitherto done only by their males.

 

And studies at the University of Alberta have found robins exposed to

the pesticide DDT before birth suffered damage to the region of the

brain that enables them to sing and protect their territory.

 

Dr David Crews of the University of Texas calls the research on

birdsong " very significant, " describing it as " the first step needed

to demonstrate a causal link between specific pollutants and the

effects on wildlife populations " .

 

Researchers have calculated that 250,000 baby girls should have been

born boys in the U.S. and Japan alone. Yet there have been strange

warning signs for decades. Way back in the early 1970s, researchers

found that female gulls had taken to nesting together all over the

U.S., the males having apparently lost interest.

 

When the bashful males were caught and examined, they were found to

have developed female egg-laying canals.

 

In the 1980s, researchers in Florida found that alligators were

failing to reproduce because their males had mysteriously tiny

penises; further investigations revealed that they had developed

female hormone patterns - and that turtles in the same waters had

developed into hermaphrodites.

 

Most alarming of all, repeated studies by Britain's own Environment

Agency have shown that about a third of the male roach in rivers and

streams right across the country have begun producing eggs, after

developing female sex organs.

 

Again, the problem was traced to oestrogen passing through sewage

works - in some areas, near particularly heavy inflows of treated

water, all the males were found to be between sexes.

 

The findings have inevitably raised concern that people may also be

affected, since one-third of the country's drinking water comes from

rivers, much of it beneath sewage outfalls.

 

And, whether or not this is the cause, male sperm counts have been

dropping precipitously both here and across the world.

 

Fertile

 

Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that average amounts

have fallen by well over half in the past 50 years, from an average

of more than 150 million per millilitre to 66 million.

 

The result is that men are now less than half as fertile as hamsters.

 

The counts are continuing to plunge by two per cent a year, and no

end to the decline is in sight. At this rate, the average man will be

unable to father children within decades.

 

Increasingly the sperm crisis is being blamed on a whole host of

chemicals, not just synthetic oestrogen, but a wide variety of

substances that have become ubiquitous in daily life.

 

They include the common plastic PVC; dioxins, the notorious

pollutants found almost everywhere; PCBs, one-and-a-half million tons

of which have been used in countless products from paints to

plastics; and phthalates, universally used to make plastics more

flexible.

 

Recent tests by WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) on 14 basic

foodstuffs taken from supermarket shelves found that every single one

contained PCBs, and most were contaminated by phthalates.

 

Both substances have been shown to have deeply worrying effects on

babies and children.

 

Scientists at Rotterdam's Erasmus University have found that boys

born to mothers exposed to PCBs grew up wanting to play with dolls

and tea-sets.

 

And research at the University of Rochester in New York State has

shown that the male children of women exposed to phthalates have

smaller penises and other signs of feminisation of their genitals.

 

Communities exposed to high levels of these and other gender-bender

chemicals, from the Great Lakes of North America to the Russian

Arctic, have been found to give birth to twice as many girls as boys.

 

This may offer a clue to the cause of a mysterious shift in the sex

of babies worldwide.

 

Conflict

 

Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls, in what is thought to

be nature's way of compensating for the fact that males were more

likely to be killed hunting or in conflict.

 

But increasingly this ratio is slipping - it is calculated that

250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born girls in the

U.S. and Japan alone.

 

You would think that all this accumulating evidence would long since

have sparked alarm in governments worldwide.

 

Far from it. When the EU drew up its first comprehensive controls on

chemicals two years ago, it largely exempted gender benders from them.

 

Britain, under Tony Blair's leadership, was largely responsible for

this exemption, and confidential documents show that it obediently

acted to water down the controls following direct representations from

the Bush administration - almost unbelievably putting the interests

of foreign firms above the health of British children.

 

Since then, as Dr Gwynne Lyons, director of the expert group CHEM

Trust puts it, there has been " regulatory inertia. "

 

That needs to change, and fast. If ministers continue wilfully to

refuse to heed the science, they should, at least, listen to the

starlings.

[Guest guest]

For anyone wanting more information about the effects of phthalates you

can go to ehponline.org and get peer-reviewed papers written by the top

researchers in the world on phthalates and many other toxins. It is

quite startling. While doing the research for my book, this was an

invaluable resource to find out what is really happening to us because

of our wanton disregard for our environment.

 

Mark Schauss

www.ToxicWorldBook.com

 

, " carolynreinhold "

<carolynreinhold wrote:

>

> [Note: I did not include the url for this article as it is no longer

> available.]

>

> Singing starlings and why thousands of babies who should have been

> boys are being born as girls

> By GEOFFREY LEAN

> 27th February 2008

>

> Next time you hear a starling sing, stop and listen hard. It may well

> be warning of a peril that endangers the whole world of nature - and

> the very future of the human race itself.

>