Gender-bending chemicals are largely exempt from new EU regulations, warns
Geoffrey Lean.

Sperm counts are falling so fast that young men are less fertile
than their fathers and produce only a third as much, proportionately,
as hamsters. And gender-bending chemicals are increasingly being blamed
for the mystery of the “lost boys”: babies who should normally be male
who have been born as girls instead.

Heres something rather rotten from the State of Denmark. Its
government yesterday unveiled official research showing that
two-year-old children are at risk from a bewildering array of
gender-bending chemicals in such everyday items as waterproof clothes,
rubber boots, bed linen, food, nappies, sunscreen lotion and
moisturising cream.

The 326-page report, published by the
environment protection agency, is the latest piece in an increasingly
alarming jigsaw. A picture is emerging of ubiquitous chemical
contamination driving down sperm counts and feminising male children
all over the developed world. And anti-pollution measures and
regulations are falling far short of getting to grips with it.

The Danish government set
out to find out how much contamination from gender-bending chemicals a
two-year-old child was exposed to every day. It concluded that a child
could be “at critical risk” from just a few exposures to high levels of
the substances, such as from rubber clogs, and imperilled by the amount
it absorbed from sources ranging from food to sunscreens.

The
results build on earlier studies showing that British children have
higher levels of gender-bending chemicals in their blood than their
parents or grandparents. Indeed WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund),
which commissioned the older research, warned that the chemicals were
so widespread that “there is very little, if anything, individuals can
do to prevent contamination of themselves and their families.”
Prominent among them are dioxins, PVC, flame retardants, phthalates
(extensively used to soften plastics) and the now largely banned PCBs,
one and a half million tons of which were used in countless products
from paints to electrical equipment.

Young boys, like those in
the Danish study, could end up producing less sperm and developing
feminised behaviour. Research at Rotterdams Erasmus University found
that boys whose mothers were exposed to PCBs and dioxins were more
likely to play with dolls and tea sets and dress up in female clothes.

And
it is in the womb that babies are most vulnerable; a study of umbilical
cords from British mothers found that every one contained hazardous
chemicals. Scientists at the University of Rochester in New York
discovered that boys born to women exposed to phthalates had smaller
penises and other feminisation of the genitals.

The contamination
may also offer a clue to a mysterious shift in the sex of babies.
Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls: it is thought to be
natures way of making up for the fact that men were more likely to be
killed hunting or in conflict. But the proportion of females is rising,
so much so that some 250,000 babies who statistically should have been
boys have ended up as girls in Japan and the United States alone. In
Britain, the discrepancy amounts to thousands of babies a year.

A
Canadian Indian community living on ancestral lands at the eastern tip
of Lake Huron, hemmed in by one of the biggest agglomerations of
chemical factories on earth, gives birth to twice as many girls as
boys. Its the same around Seveso in Italy, contaminated with dioxins
from a notorious accident in the 1970s, and among Russian pesticide
workers. And theres more evidence from places as far apart as Israel
and Taiwan, Brazil and the Arctic.

Yet gender-benders are largely
exempt from new EU regulations controlling hazardous chemicals.
Britain, then under Tony Blairs premiership, was largely responsible
for this – restricting their inclusion in the first draft of the
legislation, and then causing even what was included to be watered
down.Confidential documents show that it did so after pressure from
George W Bushs administration, which protested that US exports “could
be impacted”.

Now the Danish government is planning to lobby to
have the rules toughened up. It is particularly concerned by other
studies which show that gender-bending chemicals acting together have
far worse effects than the expected sum of their individual impacts. It
wants this to be reflected in the regulations, citing its discovery of
the many sources to which the two-year-olds are exposed – modern slings
and arrows, as it were, of outrageous fortune.