Hormones in food causing adolescent menstruation in Thailand

There has been many more than one mother who has brought their 8 or 9 year old daughter to the doctor puzzled why their daughter is menstruating at such a tender young age. The Thai doctors know the cause, but are somewhat helpless at doing more that treating the symptoms.

There is an entire chain of events that has caused this to happen with some links being bigger than others. However to sum it up, poultry in particular chicken seems to be the culprit.

With Southeast Asia being the hot spot for the H5N1 bird flu virus, huge culls of birds have been going on for some time with millions of birds in the human food chain being culled. This does have a profound effect on supply and ultimately cost. To recover from the culls and getting the stock back up to population quickly hormones become the cheap shortcut.

DCO Thailand

Add to that fact Southeast Asia is not best known for strict controls on just about anything, huge doses of hormones may easily be in the chickens as it is left up to the farmers to decide the dosage. It does not take much to see that once the farmers connect hormones with increased profit, that generous quantities are given to the birds.

Getting back to the girls who are menstruating, doctors are truly only given few options. One of the treatments is simply putting the girl on birth control pills. As birth control pills can be given to girls as young as 8 years old, there is no real harm in helping the girl regulate the unnatural hormones with compensation from her own hormones. If the girl was to continue to bleed day after day she would eventually become anemic as well as other related problems.

One of the side effects of one of the more common birth control pills is breast development. The reason for this is the birth control pill tricks the body into thinking it is pregnant. So breast development and possible lactation are outcomes as their bodies are accelerated into puberty. The end result can easily be an eleven year old girl in the fourth or fifth stage of breast development as well as all the other things that happen in mid puberty including the onset of sexual desire. This leaves us with a very young female with the mind of a child and a body that is ready to rock and roll.

Southeast Asia and in particular Thailand, sex is a big part of what makes the world go round. Thailand is well known for it’s nightlife and it is also a magnet for pedophiles as many well publicized arrests have hit the media in recent months. So to spot a young girl with a killer body, you can easily imagine the fallout if you want to talk about jail bait. However the news about the menstruating girls is centered around Northeast Thailand in an area known as Isaan and far from Bangkok and Pattaya where the nightlife is based.

There is also a health risk to early menstruation namely the increased risk of breast cancer at a young age. It has also been recently discovered that breast cancer in younger women is much more aggressive than in older women. Men are also not immune from the hormones in the food where testicular cancer is also an increased risk.


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