Last thing I read on plasticisers was something where they made fish swim in water so contaminated that they became gender reassigned.

Most “health scares” are very much a journalistic thing with no context to the numbers, rather than a medical statistical thing.

I work with phalates and BPA. The research scares industry enough that they are contracting out further studies. Theres has been a lot of good work looking at phalates at levels you would find in the environment, not to mention the fact that we are finding gender reassigned fish out in the real world as well.

The hot topic at the moment is whether multiple chemicals at very low doses have combined effects as opposed to individual effects.

The more sensible commentators pointed to a whole range of factors which could all be partially linked to the fall in crime, rather than one single, definitive cause e.g. the cost of consumer electronics falling makes them worth less on the black market therefore not worth mugging and burgling in the first place… also, it’s cheap enough for people to buy for themselves rather than nicking it.

I suspect in the UK at least it’s because would-be criminals are now too fat to get out of the house to go and nick your stuff…

This…. and the increasing prevalence of CCTV. Most criminal types are too fat to run away or too drunk or stoned to bother going out. My occasional encounters with the non-working underclass of Greater Manchester while drawing their benefits in the post office, tell me this is a significant factor.

Many fish change sex though..entirely naturally. Clownfish for one…in the finding memo movie nemo’s dad would likely have turned into a female given the lack of other female clownfish in his environment.

I reckon Hollywood would never have coped with that plot.

In ‘Freakonomics’ see here they suggest the causal link is actually between freely available abortion, and the decline in crime rates.

They suggest that less neds are getting born in the first place

Many fish change sex though..entirely naturally.

Of course, the suggestion is that the chemicals are triggering a natural process artificually, not that it’s actually forcing a metamorphisis of something that would never normally be mutable.