https://americanmind.org/salvo/eating-the-young-to-save-the-old/

The pandemic inverted the normal meaning of generational sacrifice.

A new study out of Italy reveals a significant increase in the number of girls entering puberty at a very early age, almost certainly due to the lifestyle changes and stress caused by the pandemic.

“Precocious puberty,” to give the condition its proper technical name, is defined as the development of secondary sexual characteristics, such as breasts, larger testicles, and pubic hair, before the age of 8 in girls and 9 in boys. The condition is generally associated with negative physical consequences, especially reduced stature, and based on the few studies of its broader effects, with emotional and behavioral issues such as substance abuse, social isolation, truancy, and sexual promiscuity. Danish research suggests that perhaps 0.2 percent of girls and 0.05 percent of boys undergo precocious puberty, but studies from elsewhere indicate there may be wide national variation. Scientists agree, though, that girls suffer from the condition at a much higher rate than boys, even if it isn’t totally clear why.

The researchers behind the new study looked at data for 133 diagnosed cases of precocious puberty in girls in Italy between January 2016 and June 2021. They found 72 cases before the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, and 61 alone between March 2020 and June 2021, or four new cases a month. If, for argument’s sake, the pandemic in Italy lasted two years, that would be 96 cases in total, almost three times the number of cases as would have been expected over a period of two years before the pandemic. Although the age of sexual development has been creeping younger for decades in the West, perhaps by as much as three months per decade for girls since the seventies, there’s no question that this recently observed increase is not in line with the general trend.

Weight gain is well known to increase the risk of precocious puberty, and the researchers found an increase in weight gain among girls diagnosed with the condition during the pandemic. Girls diagnosed with precocious puberty during the pandemic tended to have higher body-mass-index scores than girls diagnosed with it before the pandemic. They also spent at least two hours a day in front of a screen—rat studies suggest chronic blue-light exposure can bring forward puberty – and nearly 90% of them said they’d ceased all physical exercise. The researchers believe other factors may also have been at play, not least of all “stress, social isolation, increased conflicts between parents, economic status and the increased use of hand and surface sanitizers.” Sanitizers contain significant quantities of endocrine-disrupting chemicals such as triclosan which can interfere with puberty, and can also increase by as much as 10,000 percent the body’s absorption of such chemicals from other sources, like thermal paper.

Back in the heady days of spring 2020, nobody could have predicted that the social restrictions brought in to reduce the spread of COVID-19 would result in a spike in cases of precocious puberty among girls in Italy. But it was clear, at least to anybody who actually cared to stop and think for a moment, that if we proceeded with lockdowns, social distancing and mask mandates – as far as we understood those things back then – we would almost certainly cause dreadful unintended harm to the young, especially children and teenagers. But our governments persisted with those measures for more than two years, with the broad support of the medical and educational establishments and the general public, even as the terrible suffering of our younger generations became harder and harder to ignore.

MORE: https://americanmind.org/salvo/eating-the-young-to-save-the-old/