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EFFECTS OF STRESSFUL EVENTS IN FRANCE (1968) AND JAPAN (1995) ON THE SEX RATIO AT BIRTH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2016

Victor Grech ,
Dorota Zammit  and
Hagen Scherb
Victor Grech*
Affiliation:
Academic Department of Paediatrics, Mater Dei Hospital, Malta
Dorota Zammit
Affiliation:
National Statistics Office, Malta
Hagen Scherb
Affiliation:
Institute of Computational Biology, Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen, German Research Center for Environmental Health, Neuherberg, Germany
*
1Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Summary

Males are usually born in excess of females. The sex ratio at birth (SR) is often expressed as the ratio of male to total births. A wide variety of factors have been shown to influence SR, including terrorist attacks, which have been shown to reduce SR. This paper reviews the effects on SR outcomes of the stressful events in France in 1968 (in association with the student and worker riots) and in Japan following the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult’s attack on the Tokyo subway using sarin nerve gas in 1995. Both countries displayed seasonal variation in SR. France exhibited a decline in SR in 1968 (p=0.042), with a particularly strong dip in May of that year (p=0.015). For Japan, there was no statistically significant dip for 1995 but there was a significant dip in June of that year (p=0.026). The SR dips follow catastrophic or tragic events if these are perceived to be momentous enough by a given populace. It is believed that SR slumps may be caused by population stress, which is known to lead to the culling of frail/small male fetuses. It has been observed that these fluctuations are comparable in intensity to a substantial proportion of quoted values for perinatal mortality, potentially making this a public health issue.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Biosocial Science , Volume 49 , Issue 5 , September 2017 , pp. 664 - 674
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2016 

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