Environmetrical methods applied for the evaluation of adverse genetic effects induced by chemical or physical environmental pollution.

It has been evident for decades that environmental chemicals as well as radiation pose an enormous risk to the environment as well as to humans. However, this important topic is still underestimated in every part of society. Over the last 20 years, anthropogenic chemicals research, often closely connected with endocrine disruption research, has shown how chemicals in our environment can profoundly affect development, growth, maturation, and reproduction by mimicking hormones or interacting with hormone receptors. The effects of environmental contaminants on health are a major concern because exposure is associated with a number of diseases, including cancer, diabetes, congenital malformations and infertility. Similar effects are induced by radiation. Environmental ionizing radiation is of special interest as it can induce germ cell mutations and somatic mutations alike. Children’s development is known to be especially radio-sensitive, from conception through the embryonic and fetal periods, to infancy. The support of environmental and health research by statistical and mathematical data-analysis methods in order to demonstrate effects of adverse environmental conditions as well as to assess possible remediation measures is essential. In this respect, metrical scientific disciplines like Chemometrics, Environmetrics, and Biometrics play an important role. We will present two studies, one on the sex ratio after the atmospheric atomic bomb testing from 1945 to 1963 as well as before and after the Chernobyl accident, and the other one on environmental chemicals found in breast milk samples in Denmark and Finland which might lead to cryptorchidism.   Straightforward time trend analyses of official European and USA gender specific birth statistics reveal certain disturbances of the sex odds after the atmospheric atomic bomb test ban on the whole globe and after the Chernobyl accident in Europe. Our results suggest that the global loss of children due to the atmospheric atomic bomb tests and due to the Chernobyl catastrophe may well be in the range of several millions. Moreover, our results contribute to disproving the established and prevailing belief that radiation-induced hereditary effects have yet to be detected in human populations. More research should be initiated to strengthen the evidence achieved and more importantly to open minds to the danger of ionizing radiation.   The second approach concerning environmental chemicals is based on the theory partially ordered sets. The theory of partial order is a discipline of Discrete Mathematics and one may consider partial order as an example of mathematics without numerical arithmetic. The graphical representation of partial orders is laid down in so-called Hasse diagrams. In that data analysis we investigated data sets of breast milk samples of 130 women in Denmark and Finland which contained measurable levels of 32 Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). The chemicals are classified according to four structure classes. We apply a discrete mathematical evaluation method, the Hasse diagram technique. The software program is named PyHasse (Python). We use two features of this program, the Dominance-Dominance-Separability analysis which is followed by an Interval Analysis. These data analysis steps are necessary to simplify the attributes (breast mild samples) of the data sets. The aim of this discrete mathematical approach is to find differences in the chemicals’ contamination between the healthy boys and those boys who were suffering from congenital malformations (cryptorchidism)