Doctors baffled by Indian village of over 200 sets of twins

Summary

August 4, 2009: The village of Kodinji, India (population ~15,000) is home to over 230 sets of twins. This is 4 times the statistical average for a community of it's size. Currently, 5 more women are also pregnant with Twins. Doctors are baffled, as the village has none of the usual environmental or cultural factors that generally contribute to twinage (such as exposure to fertility drugs, certain modern dietary habits, or pregnancies happening late in life). Instead, this is a traditional community in a remote area - often separated from the rest of India by flooding during the monsoon season. Which has lead to some people suggesting it's something in the water¹.

Source

Bibliography

1. http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/08/06/us-india-twins-idUSTRE5752XF20090806 Original Article]

Game and Story Use

• A locale with this sort of "problem" could be the initial hook for an investigation, where the Fortean anomaly has a sinister cause.
  • The village may be located in an area with unusual levels of magic or mana.
  • A Corrupt Corporate Executive may have ordered the dumping of PCBs or other mutagenic chemicals upstream from Kodinji, which contaminates their fields during the flood season.
  • Some strange creature of the Cthulhu Mythos may be exerting it's influence on the community, along the lines of Yog-Sothoth in The Dunwich Horror. Imagine a town with more than 400 half-alien Whateley children.
  • In the Continuum RPG, there's an era of prehistory called the "Midwife's Crisis" where every birth in the world is twins. It's strongly implied the cause is tied into a war between modern Time Travelers and an ancient precursoresque Lost Civilization.

Footnotes

1. Actually, assuming that these are mostly fraternal twins, it's more likely to result from inbreeding - the tendency to dual rather than single ovulation (which is required to produce fraternal twins) is strongly heritable in the female line and given the tendencies of isolated rural communities to inbreed by default, the simplest answer is likely to be that this tendency has become widespread in the villages women from one or more common ancestrices. A spate of identical twins, on the other hand, would be freaky.