Culture
Philippines Typhoons Disproportionately Kill Baby Girls
Young girls have a higher risk than boys of perishing in the months and years after a typhoon, say researchers.
Anybody stuck in a typhoon is in for a bad time. But if you happen to be an infant girl, you're due for an even worse experience, with a heightened risk of death lasting two years after the typhoon passes.
That's the case in the Philippines, at least, according to an analysis of the country's violent weather. Two economists from the Bay Area, Solomon Hsiang at UC Berkeley and Jesse Anttila-Hughes at the University of San Francisco, looked at the past 25 years of typhoons in the Philippines. They found what they call "dramatic increases" in mortality rates for infant girls in the wake of these tree-downing, house-obliterating tempests, according to Berkeley's news center: