Candido Godoi, Brazil

 

Cândido Godói, a small town in Southern Brazil, nicknamed as ‘Twin Land’. As the name suggests, a phenomenal number of twins are born in the remote town each year –'Twin Land' The place where more than one in 10 pregnancies is a multiple birth. it’s twin birth rate is 18 times higher than the world average and it  has some 700 twins in population of 6,600 - 1,000% higher than global average twin rate Why?

Well according to its local, it was after Nazi physician Mengele, who fled to the village after ending of World War II, that the births started happening. Oddly enough Mengele was known to have a strange fascination with twins.

Mengele disguised himself as a roaming physician and veterinarian and gave pregnant women in Cândido Godói an ahead-of-its-time, twin-inducing mix of drugs or hormones, the historian suggests.

Mengele, who died in Brazil in 1979, was notorious for his often-deadly experiments on twins at Auschwitz, ostensibly in an effort to produce a master Aryan race for Hitler.

Modern scientists, however, propose  that it is most likely due to toxic waste or inbreeding.

In 2009, a series of DNA tests were conducted on about 30 families by Brazilian geneticist Ursula Matte and her team of 20 researchers. Through the tests, it was discovered that a specific gene occurs more frequently in the village in the mothers of twins, than in mothers without twins. And given the high level of inbreeding in the small town largely populated by German-speaking immigrants, the phenomenon is bound to have compounded.

Dr Matte found that from 1990 to 1994, 10 percent of the births in São Pedro were twins, compared with less than 1 percent for Brazil as a whole.

 ‘We analyzed six genes and found one gene that confirms, in this population, a predisposition to the birth of twins,’ Dr Matte told the New York Times.

The scientists believe that a small number of immigrant families living in São Pedro may have brought the variant gene to the region. “This does not mean that it is a universal gene,” Dr. Matte said. “If I take twins from New Zealand and test them, it will probably generate a different result.”