Reportedly, Katrina Kaif was dragged into the black money controversy after the department officials came across a laptop of an employee who works in the talent management firm that handles Kaif. ‘This is a list of suspects to investigate, and all the suspects have some credible evidence, but we’re very far from conviction,’ said Andrey Rzhetsky at the University of Chicago, who led the research.With the Income Tax recently trying to seize black money from varied professionals, film industry too wasn’t sparred from their raids. Researchers believe more work needs to be done to examine the effects of chemicals on human cells or animal models in the laboratory to pin them as the direct cause. While the research only demonstrated correlations between the various factors and sex ratios at birth, it did not determine the cause and effect. Past studies have also found sex ratios vary with time and are possibly driven by a number of environmental factors, such as chemical pollution, stressful events on pregnant women (such as terrorist attacks and earthquakes), radiation, changes in weather, and even seasons of conception. Male-embryo deaths have also been observed to occur but during the late-second and third trimesters. Female-embryo pregnancies may terminate early in development. ‘This doesn’t necessarily mean of lower quality, but does indicate the conclusions may not be as certain,’ he added.Ī number of factors may affect the sex ratio. He said that while the populations studied were large, the number of US births was relatively small, with the total over 8 years less than the annual average of 3.8m births. without cellular research, these will always be associations,’ said Gareth Nye, an expert in pregnancy at the University of Chester, UK, who was not part of the study. ‘The thinking is that pollutants may influence the very early stage of fertilisation, leading to one sex direction over another. One of the drawbacks of the study was that the scientists did not have data on the sex of stillborn babies in the US population and it had used private medical insurance data and so was not fully representative of the entire population. The results found a significant change in the sex ratio 34 weeks after the Virginia Tech shootings, with more girls being born. The researchers also examined two highly stressful events in the US: Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007.
Previous research on the impact on sex ratio of toxic pollutants called PCBs was inconclusive, but the new analysis found it significantly increased the number of boys. In a population of 1 million, that would mean 60,000 more girls being born than boys or vice versa. The study found that mercury pollution and proximity to industrial plants shifted the sex ratio up to 3%. ‘There are a lot of myths about sex ratio and birth, but when you dig into the research, it turns out that everything that was tested on real data was done on relatively small samples, and some statements are not founded in observations at all,’ said Rzhetsky. The difference in the physiology of male and female embryos is not identical and hence these fluctuations in sex ratios make sense as they have different hormonal backgrounds.
‘The question is why, and there are many suggested factors, such as stress or something in the environment,’ said Rzhetsky as reported by The Guardian. But hormonal factors can terminate more female embryos, or more male ones, during pregnancy, leading to skewed sex ratios.
The sex of babies is determined at conception when exactly half of the embryos should be girls and half boys. However, other factors such as the season of birth, weather temperature, rates of violent crime and unemployment, did not show significant correlations. Proximity to farming also affected the sex ratio, possibly due to higher chemical exposures. Both were linked to statistically significant changes in sex ratios. The study took into account measures of deprivation, such as a high number of fast-food restaurants and vacant buildings and indicators of stress, including road deaths and the Virginia Tech shootings. ‘Our present study is the first systematic investigation of numerous chemical pollutants and other environmental factors using large datasets from two continents,’ said the researchers.Īlthough the overall variation was found to be small, researchers believe that the large sizes of the two datasets made it a significant factor. The study was done by examining over half of the US population of approximately 150 million for over 8 years and the entire Swedish population of approximately 9 million for over 30 years.