The Cândido Godói Twin Phenomenon: Why Are So Many Twins Born Here?

For decades in the Cândido Godói ( CG ) municipality in Brazil , there was a unusual mystery : The pace oftwin birthsis significantly higher than the fence in area , and twin births around the world .

Studieshave put the twin nascence rate at 10 percent in one district , which is " importantly higher than the 1.8 percent rate for the state of Rio Grande do Sul as a whole " . While intriguing , people have concocted unusual explanations for why so many twins are stick out in the area , fromsomething in the waterto strange mineral .

A book by diary keeper Jorge Camarasa went unknown , propose that the phenomenon was the result of experiment direct by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele , sometimes advert to as the " Angel of Death " for his terrible crimes and experimentation as principal doctor atAuschwitz .

During his time at Auschwitz , Mengele try out on Gemini , help to fire this ( almost certainly untrue ) hypothesis .

" Mengele ordered his stave to measure and record every look of the Gemini ’ body . He drew large total of blood from the twins and sometimes performed other painful function on them , " theUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museumexplains of Mengele . " Mengele also murdered sets of twin at the same time in parliamentary law to carry on autopsies of their clay . "

As the warfare was cease , Mengele take flight Auschwitz and disguised himself as a German officer , before give up to the US . He was release before the US realized he was a wanted war criminal , and returned to Germany for a few years , before fleeing to Argentina revere arrest , and then Paraguay , and finally , Brazil where he break of a separatrix in 1979 .

" According to Camarasa , Mengele could have lived and mould as a physician in CG in the beginning of the 1960s , after living in Buenos Aires , " where he continued unspecified experiment on Gemini , a field of study looking into the cause of the twin phenomenon explains .

This study assessed the claim by looking at twinned pace before , during , and after Mengele had stayed there according to Camasara , " even though Camarasa ’s supposition were not based on any actual historical records uncommitted " .

Looking at baptism records , the study did find that twins were born at a higher rate in the area from 1959 to 2008 . However , the researchers found that there was " no increase on the twinning rate in CG between the period 1964–1968 and the remaining year " , during or after Mengele was supposedly there .

or else , the squad put the drive down to the transmissible " founder effect " , where a new dependency is established by a small number of masses .

" The colonization story of CG is suggestive that a transmissible founding father event may have played a role in this process , leading to gamy shifts in allele frequency between the ancestral and the derived population . Because it is a random process , founder effects have unpredictable phenotypic essence , which , in this specific case , may be a in high spirits frequency of biparous , " the squad wrote in their discussion , add " strong grounds for the guess of a genetical founder core descend from the higher inbreeding coefficient found for cleaning woman who gave birth to twin compared to other women " .

The team hoped that the study would provide substitute for citizenry living in Cândido Godói , as they rule out the possibility that their twin birth were the result of Nazi experiments .

" In this sense , our subject field illustrates how noesis of population history and the genetic consequence may be of verbatim interest group for the populations under subject field " , they add .

The subject is issue inPLOS ONE .