"In certain villages only girls are being born"

This is a very interesting story, extracted from the transcript of the "Living on Earth" radio program that aired last week.

In certain villages in northern Greenland something is completely out of whack—only girls are being born... studies conducted a few years ago now coming to light show that in other Arctic regions, the sex ratios of babies are also out of kilter.

In 2004 the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program found a correlation between exposure to PCBs and shifts in the sex ratios of babies born to indigenous mothers living in the northern reaches of Russia. PCBs and other persistent organic chemicals such as pesticides travel from industrial countries up the food chain into the blubber of marine mammals.

"...And that's a quite dramatic change from a normal situation where there are more boys than girls born.

CURWOOD: Now when you say more boys than girls born, how many more boys than girls?

REIERSEN: I think normally—statistically—there is 1.05 or 1.1 boy per girl. That's the normal average.

CURWOOD: In this population though it's 2.0 girls per boy.