The other day a Smithsonian magazine pictured the giraffe; years ago it wasn’t one of those exotic animals that graced magazine fronts. Today everything seems to be headed towards extinction, even humans. As we have produced chemical substitutes and derivatives from chemicals we produced, we have unleashed those that are harmful to us and are reducing our chances to survive as specie. It is the male sex chromosome, which is being hit and the male gender. We might be joining the solitary giraffe on a magazine front one-day along with other majestic animals like the elephant, the tiger and ones that were all to common in our childhood.

The chemical I heard about is a plastic component and makes them soft. Phthalates are being used because people complained about the hard-edged plastic toys that cut and physically injured toddlers in the thirties. The same chemical is found in the urine of babies that are treated with baby lotions. Little did we know that we would be introducing a substance that would interfere with the differentiation of the male sex organs such that male babies are being born with undescended testicles or testicles behind the abdominal wall. The body heat would destroy the spermatozoids before they would have a chance to differentiate and the teenager would be sterile for life.

A study had been conducted on an industrial town in Ontario where the ratio of man to women is much lower than the national average. This kicked off an alarm that got scientists interested in the effects of the industrial wastes and much has been linked to secondary oil products including the one mentioned above.

Many substitutes were produced as spin off in the fifties because they were cheaper to produce and they had a wide variety of applications. In this waste making society it meant that we had more to dispose of and more to harm us years later because no tests were carried on those chemicals. One has only to remember the battle against cigarette tobacco to know how many years it took to convince a large segment of the population on the perils of smoking that product not to mention inhaling its smoke as an innocent bystander.