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Unexpected step-like increases in emergency medical hospital admissions, general practitioner (GP) referrals, and wider health care costs that appear to repeat at an interval between three to eight years in length have been observed in the United Kingdom (UK) and other countries. Based on the observation that the step changes appear to be restricted to a group of diagnoses associated with infection or inflammation, it has been proposed that outbreaks of an unknown type of infectious immune impairment are responsible for the cycle. Both infection and inflammation have been implicated in changes in the gender ratio (male-to-female births) observed in humans and animals, and this development presents an opportunity to test the infectious outbreak hypothesis. Monthly live births in England and Wales between 1980 and 2008 were studied. After adjusting for the effects of the solar sunspot cycle and season on the gender ratio, the pattern in the residual ratio (actual minus predicted) appears to align with the cycle of step changes in medical admissions and costs. It appears that each outbreak initiates a cascade of condition-specific effects, which include conception and/or fetal loss along with other effects on adults, and more specifically on the elderly. An additional peak in the gender ratio for conceptions in September, October, and November 1986 appears to correspond to the impact of fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear accident in April 1986 and seems to confirm the results of other studies on the impact of low levels of nuclear radiation on the gender ratio. Biomed . Int . 2013; 4: 26-39. ©2013 Biomedicine International,
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