Fertility

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A pair of new studies unveiled this week at the Scientific Congress of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) in Denver suggest that American and European men’s sperm count and sperm motility—that is, the “swimming” ability of sperm cells—have declined in the past decade, which follows a similar, broader trend observed by many scientists over the past few decades.

Historically such studies have been “largely ignored or dismissed on the grounds that they have been subject to selection bias and/or the inclusion of data from men with fertility or testicular problems,” the author Richard M. Sharpe wrote in the Journal of Endocrinology. But then the British Medical Journal published its landmark, comprehensive 1992 study that indicated “a genuine decline in semen quality over the past 50 years,” and scientists began hypothesizing about potential causes.

As a story in GQ(!) noted earlier this year, a widely cited study published in 2017 by researchers from the Hebrew University and Mount Sinai’s medical school found that among nearly 43,000 men from North America, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia, sperm counts per milliliter of semen had declined more than 50 percent from 1973 to 2011. And not only that, “but total sperm counts were down by almost 60 percent: We are producing less semen, and that semen has fewer sperm cells in it,” wrote the GQ contributor Daniel Noah Halpern. When Halpern asked several scientists why, they presented a united front: It was the unprecedented amount of chemicals now routinely entering the human body. “There has been a chemical revolution going on starting from the beginning of the 19th century, maybe even a bit before,” one biologist told Halpern, “and upwards and exploding after the Second World War, when hundreds of new chemicals came onto the market within a very short time frame.”

Does this sound familiar?

Halpern went on to explain that many chemical compounds that are used to make plastic hard (like Bisphenol A, or BPA) or soft (like phthalates) can mimic estrogen in the bloodstream—so men with lots of phthalates in their system are likely to produce less testosterone and fewer sperm (though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration stated earlier this year, somewhat controversially, that its research continues to support its claim that the authorized amounts and uses of BPA are safe for consumers).

Fetters wrote in The Atlantic(!), " Studies like the new ones presented by ASRM, in other words, increasingly serve as bolstering evidence to what many scientists already believe. As scientists reach a consensus that something is happening to men’s sperm in the Western world, the next phase will be to figure out exactly what, and why."

So..is this question more important, or less important, than the question of global warming?

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