Dude, Where’s My Sperm?
I’ve been freaking myself out over the past 24 hours by reading Reece Rushing’s CAP report on dangerous chemicals impairing American fertility. For the fellows, there’s reduced sperm count:
And the ladies aren’t being spared either:
What’s to blame? Well:
The following slides provide an overview of this problem and spotlight three chemical groups—phthalates, Bisphenol A, and polybrominated diphenyl ethers—that are linked to reproductive health consequences, including miscarriages, endometriosis, male genital defects, low sperm count, and others. Phthalates and BPA are found in toys, food containers, cosmetics, and many other consumer products. PBDEs are used as flame retardants in household furniture and electronics. Other chemicals also threaten reproductive health, but these three are among the most prevalent in the daily lives of all Americans and are just starting to receive serious attention from the U.S. Congress and federal regulators.
Nick Kristof wrote about some closely related issues, including intersex fish and frogs with extra legs. Be afraid. The overwhelming urgency of the climate change issue has tended to push other environmental concerns off the table, but dangerous chemicals are still bad.
53 Responses to “Dude, Where’s My Sperm?”
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July 22nd, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Unlike climate change, this problem actually will go away if we ignore it long enough. Nothing drives adaptation better than a chemical that impairs the reduction of the most chemically-sensitive members of the population. Just give it a few generations (and for god’s sake, don’t switch to newer chemicals!)
July 22nd, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Yes, it’ll be a great day when we can finally legislate furniture flame retardants out of existence, and ban tupperware.
July 22nd, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Think how bad it’d be if the FDA weren’t protekkting© us.
July 22nd, 2009 at 5:54 pm
I guess we better get started on the Human Project then…
July 22nd, 2009 at 5:55 pm
There are plenty of estrogen analogs in plastics, but alcohol crushes sperm counts, too.
July 22nd, 2009 at 5:57 pm
The sperm count graph doesn’t look like real data. Real data is never so smooth and linear. What’s the real data look like?
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Don’t worry about it, Matt; who cares about absolute numbers? What matters is relative advantage and disadvantage, and there are plenty of people exposed to those chemicals just as much as you and more. If everyone is equally worse off, then evolutionarily speaking, it’s like there’s no difference at all.
That being said, we’ll need a swift and terrible preemptive strike on the hippies before they take all our women.
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:01 pm
If these types of chemicals impaired only human fertility, but not that of other life forms, they’d be great for the environment.
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:02 pm
The actual sperm count data is here: The Question of Declining Sperm Density Revisited: An Analysis of 101 Studies Published 1934–1996 by Shanna H. Swan, Eric P. Elkin, and Laura Fenster. See page 963.
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Few things inflame me with more rage than this chart. This is the evidence, stronger than anything else, that our late-capitalist society is fundamentally evil. Not only has the modern world corrupted our souls, it has corrupted our bodies, and damaged our very capacity for fertility.
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:12 pm
“but alcohol crushes sperm counts, too”
Yeah, but alcohol makes up for it by increasing sexual promiscuity and decreasing the likelihood of contraception. Marijuana, on the other hand, decreases sperm counts and promiscuity. Not sure about the effect on contraception use. If you’re too stoned to open a condom wrapper, you’re probably too stoned to get laid. You probably can’t get off the couch anyway.
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:13 pm
And, Hector, it’s contaminating our Precious Bodily Fluids.
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:43 pm
It seems to me that back in the “Population Bomb” era (the dystopian scenarios of which we have merely postponed, rather than averted), this would have been greeted as good news. Why should we not greet it that way ourselves?
(Shorter me: I agree with Cyrus.)
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:43 pm
I worked with the CDC on a cancer screening project a while ago, and it was maddening the extent to which their institutional dogma pushed them to downplay the possibility that environmental factors play a role in the rising incidence of breast cancer.
They perform some fairly sophisticated data analysis to identify localized clusters by census tract, but they rely on incomplete sets of information from cancer registries: they only look at the address at the time of diagnosis, and they don’t ask basic epidemiological questions such as whether the household gets its water from a well. Garbage in, garbage out.
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Well, well.. I hate to break the news about this, but I will let you down gently. The chemicals described in the article are found in sex toys… such as, rabbits, vibrators, dildo’s and beads. There I think you will find the answer to this problem.
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:47 pm
I can’t believe I’m the first person to say:
“Cue they Python’s ‘Every Sperm Is Sacred’!”
July 22nd, 2009 at 6:51 pm
Well, MosBen, you beat me by about 5 minutes!
July 22nd, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Marijuana decreases promiscuity? In my pothead days we screwed like weasels.
July 22nd, 2009 at 7:09 pm
No, the complete fear mongering over “climate change” has made it impossible to work on anything that might actually matter.
Great job guys
July 22nd, 2009 at 7:12 pm
What’s the problem? You only need one.
July 22nd, 2009 at 7:44 pm
So, F#CK 20% more often.
July 22nd, 2009 at 7:55 pm
And lower sperm count is a problem how… ?
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Rich in PA,
Not quite. Sperm secretes an enzyme that dissolves the protective coating around the ovum and makes it easier to, as it were, penetrate. So the bulk quantity of sperm does matter.
Point,
It’s a problem (and an extremely serious one) inasmuch as it reduces fertility and makes it harder (for some people, maybe impossible) to have children.
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:01 pm
There are some truly bizarre comments in this thread.
This is about humanities ability to reproduce.
It might be about your ability to reproduce (assuming that’s a future interest any of you have).
The trend lines are dramatic and the data seems well validated, replicated, and easily replicable. See the article cited by “stefan”, above (thanks, “stefan”).
The CAP study cited by Matt points out that it’s more than just “fertility problems, [and] miscarriages” it’s also about “preterm births, and birth defects [that] are all increasing.”
So it’s not just whether some people are able to reproduce a ‘next generation’ it’s also that the health of those next generations may be increasingly impaired.
Despite the snarky comments by trolls, this is very serious stuff, it was largely predicted (accurately) by the left and consistently ignored by the right.
If the right were really concerned about the “children” (instead of the next buck made off of pollutants) there would be immediate withdrawal of several classes of products correlated with preterm births and birth defects as well as products correlated with reduced sperm counts and increases in miscarriages.
But apparently the right wing has grown so recklessly arrogant about gambling the planet’s climate system and gambling the planet’s ecosystems that gambling humanities reproductive abilities is just one more thing for right wingers to bet on.
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:20 pm
This is not a “left” vs “right” issue. Get a clue.
It amazes me how many people are only capable of viewing life through such a limited perspective.
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:22 pm
Yikes, so Children of Men is no longer fiction.
I assume there are medical ways around this if the trend goes to its ultimate conclusion, but it would be a sad commentary on our civilization if our actions lead us to become like our farm turkeys: incapable of natural reproduction.
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:23 pm
I don’t want to come across as some GOP apologist here, but why exactly is this a problem?
Do we actually have a SERIOUS problem of not enough children world-wide (or for that matter in the US)? Who gives a damn if your sperm density is 120 or 60 or 30 or 3, as long as it does the job. Likewise what exactly is the meaning of “impaired fecundity” — couldn’t get pregnant with one try, or couldn’t get pregnant after five years of trying?
My reactions to this article are basically
(1) There are too many damn people on earth right now. Three cheers for anything that cuts down their numbers BUT
(2) There is nothing in these numbers that actually indicates ANY implications for actual realized fertility, so the cheering regarding point (1) will have to wait.
People are raising reasonable points (eg @24 above), but if the concern is the health of the next generation, let’s have some data regarding THAT, not some data that, frankly, doesn’t do much for me.
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Endocrine disrupting chemicals and POPs are very bad, and most of them are probably unnecessary—especially those used in cleaning supplies that could be replaced with white vinegar and baking soda.
Many women have found that they are infertile because they actually have testes internally, rather than ovaries. Endocrine disrupting chemicals are largely responsible for this. I’d wager pesticides and herbicides are the main offenders.
DDT causes infertility, though it wasn’t discovered until the generation of birds born after the one that had been sprayed. It was, at first, thought to be habitat destruction, but it was the pesticides.
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:31 pm
In ‘93 Professor Lou Guillette provided the money quote to Congress: ‘Every man in this room is half the man his grandfather was.’ Guillette is the Florida researcher investigating the effect of pesticides on the panther and ‘gator reproductive systems.
And yeah that quote works on several levels, but it was in reference to declining sperm counts. This is a very old and serious problem. Guys, if the wife uses the wrong make up or is exposed to pesticide at the wrong time (kill them roaches!) the boy children are liable to have some serious issues.
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:45 pm
In McMegan’s hair.
You should have banked the good stuff when you were 18.
My 24 year old second wife will be getting the vintage stuff via in vitro when I am old, cranky and full of dangerous chemicals.
July 22nd, 2009 at 8:48 pm
Endocrine disruptors in our water supply is very, very bad news for all of us. They don’t just lower our fertility, they can make us hit puberty earlier, cause more cancer, and give us more birth defects. They are also devastating to wild populations of fish and frogs.
I recently attended a talk by this guy , Ryoji Noyori, a Nobel prize winner that is working on a way to break down these hormones before they make it into our water. Very important work, you guys should check it out.
July 22nd, 2009 at 9:07 pm
From the CDC
I can’t find the exact quote, but I’ve read that women are most vulnerable to chemical contamination during the first fifty days of pregnancy—often before they even suspect that they’re pregnant.
Women who want to get pregnant, or plan to get pregnant within a year or two, might want to treat their bodies and their environment as if they’re already pregnant, and make sure they’re getting adequate amounts of folic acid and iron.
Men can cause birth defects by being drunk or by being exposed to contaminants that harm their sperm while they are producing it.
July 22nd, 2009 at 9:18 pm
Oh, and women, good luck finding water that doesnt contain hormones for you to drink while you’re pregnant. Those things are nearly impossible to break down, and i don’t know if most bottled water is even tested for hormones? You MIGHT be okay with real spring water, but maybe not.
July 22nd, 2009 at 9:33 pm
After taking a look at stefan’s article linked earlier in the thread, what’s the deal with Europe? (See figure 2, page 963 – the red line is Europe’s sperm density. Compare to the purple one for North America.)
July 22nd, 2009 at 11:41 pm
MY “The overwhelming urgency of the climate change issue has tended to push other environmental concerns off the table”
Perhaps in the glamorous world of the Washington blogger, whose recent bent in this arena lies only with grand battles fought over meaningless climate change legislation.
But for many, climate change and environmental issues are one and the same, and Hector, @10, has identified the root cause of the impending disaster sure to occur on both fronts.
July 23rd, 2009 at 12:09 am
My newborn son was born with a minor genital defect; one of his testicles is undescended. This condition affects some 7% of boys born in the USA today, seems to have risen from a rate of 2% early this century.
Fortunately, it tends to descend on its own, and only sometimes requires a surgical intervention. Nonetheless, to those commentors saying what’s the big deal… FUCK YOU.
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:26 am
Dob, I had that problem. After about a year, they just corrected it with surgery. It leaves a scar, but it tends to fade. Most of my female partners have either failed to notice or just never asked.
And yeah, most of these commenters are stupid. I don’t know why this subject should be any different than any other subject. These people ignore entirely the fact that there are things in this world they don’t know, and instead pretend to be experts on everything. Saying ‘who cares, no big deal’ when experts do, in fact, declare it to be a big deal is EXACTLY what global warming deniers do. But these folks think they are smarter than the global warming deniers when, in reality, they are subject to the exact same kind of hubris.
July 23rd, 2009 at 8:33 am
Hector, I was joking! But thanks again for steering me to Daniel Larison, who is now part of my daily rotation.
July 23rd, 2009 at 10:33 am
Thanks, soullite. I apologize for my overreaction, I don’t suffer fools gladly at the best of times and this problem affects my nearest and dearest.
For those idiots saying that animals will evolve a way around this, consider that it’s a frequent occurrence for an environment to be destabilized faster than its inhabitants can cope. This leads to extinction, either localized or, in fact, planet-wide extinction events, of which I think we know of five or six in the past several hundred million years. One of which, notably, we’re living through RIGHT NOW. More specifically, we’re causing it.
July 23rd, 2009 at 10:35 am
We must act quickly to avert the dreaded specter of… underpopulation? Wait, what?
Seriously, an EPA not controlled by the Bush Administration might want to look into this, but it’s hardly an existential threat. IIRC our birth rate hasn’t even dropped below replacement, let alone low enough that we couldn’t maintain our population through adoption and immigration (for both of which we are a *very* desirable destination notwithstanding our scary chemicals) – and that’s if you assume we need a population as large as the one we have in the first place.
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:30 am
Wow Chris, way to totally ignore what everyone else in the thread is saying. This isn’t only affecting fertility! Endocrine disruptors cause a whole host of other problems including, as already mentioned, cancer and birth defects. And if you don’t care about your fellow people, at least realize that what we dump into our wastewater is also having devastating effects on local wildlife, which can I assume you would agree is a bad thing?
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:41 am
Looks like the problem may be passed on thru generations epigenetically.
In this study, not only did a pesticide (vinclozolin) f**k up the balls of the exposed rats, it f**ked up the balls of their offspring, at least as far as the great-grandkids:
http://endo.endojournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/147/6/s43:
Epigenetic Transgenerational Actions of Endocrine Disruptors
Matthew D. Anway and Michael K. Skinner
Abstract
Endocrine disruptors have recently been shown to promote an epigenetic transgenerational phenotype involving a number of disease states (e.g. male infertility). The anti-androgenic fungicide vinclozolin was found to act transiently at the time of embryonic sex determination to promote in the F1 generation a spermatogenic cell defect and subfertility in the male. When the animals were allowed to age up to 1 yr, a number of other disease states developed. This phenotype was transferred through the male germ line to all subsequent generations analyzed (F1–F4). The ability of an environmental factor (i.e. endocrine disruptor) to promote an epigenetic transgenerational phenotype impacts the potential hazards of environmental toxins, mechanisms of disease etiology, and evolutionary biology.
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:43 am
“Many women have found that they are infertile because they actually have testes internally, rather than ovaries. Endocrine disrupting chemicals are largely responsible for this.”
I’d suspect that’d be more likely to be a chromosomal or genetic abnormality (like androgen insensitivity) than an environmental issue.
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:51 am
“That being said, we’ll need a swift and terrible preemptive strike on the hippies before they take all our women.”
Considering smoking pot *really* drops sperm count, those hippies are likely to be shooting blanks.
July 23rd, 2009 at 11:58 am
Looking at one of the underlying studies for the data:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1240129&blobtype=pdf
the correlation over time of sperm counts is pretty crappy one (R2 = 0.22 using a simple linear model). The data is really noisy. The coincidence with increased genital deformities is an indication that it probably isn’t random or due to other factors (like more frequent, umm, discharges, as attitudes towards sex and masturbation change). But the trends are not that strong, and the decline is more evident from 1930-1970 than from 1970-2000.
July 23rd, 2009 at 12:01 pm
43: And I’d suspect that, upon close examination, you’d find that your head is lodged firmly, irretrievably, up your ass. Both of our suspicions have about the same evidence in favor of them.
July 23rd, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Again, I must apologize, I’m taking this far too personally. Some toxic combination of frustration over this, health care, the economy, and the toxic inability of the monied interests to either acknowledge or care about any considerations other than there on is really setting my teeth on edge today. Maybe it’s being a new father and realizing just what a pile of hypocritical shit our modern civilization is. I take some consolation in reading history and learning that it were ever thus, but given advances in technology, the the magnitude of the problems we are able to blithely create today really is substantively different than the past.
July 23rd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Sigh…we all knew this anyway didn’t we?
The only upside is that, at the rate we are going with the wingnuts who oppose birth control, determined people will know which chemicals might help with family planning.
July 23rd, 2009 at 1:40 pm
“43: And I’d suspect that, upon close examination, you’d find that your head is lodged firmly, irretrievably, up your ass. Both of our suspicions have about the same evidence in favor of them.”
No. Genetic androgen insensitivity can cause XY individuals to be externally female but having testes. This is well documented:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrome
I’d be willing to accept that environmental exposure is causing epigenetic androgen insensitivity, but I’d have to see a scientific paper on it.
The science on the effect of endocrine disruptors is plausible but it’s more tentative than presented here. That’s partially because of the difficulty of determining effects using conventional toxiological methods. The effects are subtle, and doses are extremely small, and there’s many confounding variables. The evidence is stronger than it was a decade ago, though. But let’s not make fools of ourselves by claiming effects that are known to be genetic in nature (liek androgen insensitivity) are consequences of environmental insult.
July 23rd, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Most of my female partners have either failed to notice or just never asked.
soullite – basing your conclusions on the reactions of multiple inanimate objects is not particularly helpful
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:26 pm
To all the people claiming to be so horrified about the reaction of people like myself, let me explain the issue in powerpoint terms.
(a) We are NOT complaining about the content of Matt’s post, we are complaining about the structure of the logical argument presented.
(b) That argument goes as follows
Various chemicals
(1) -> are causing
Men in the US have lower sperm counts
[ (2) -> which will
Cause lower than desired fertility ]
Let’s examine this argument.
The lower sperm counts we’ll take as an empirically valid point (though some have disputed it). The claim that this is caused by certain specific chemicals we’ll also take as valid (though again this is in dispute).
What is problematic is the part I enclosed in brackets [], which MY did not state but implied. NO evidence is provided for this claim, only the implication that a lower sperm count implies lower than desired fertility.
What some other poster have done is state (or more frequently hint at without suggesting) an alternative argument in brackets
[ (2) -> which will
Cause various birth defects ]
Again this is simply asserted with no corroborating evidence.
What are my points?
(a) If you want to claim that something is bad, state explicitly what you think is bad. Lower sperm counts are NOT, in themselves bad. They are only bad if they are a proxy for, or implication of, something else. If you don’t even tell the world what that something is that you are worried about, you are not putting forward a useful argument.
(b) I don’t want to be like a climate or creationist here insisting on evidence of claims, then ignoring denialist it when I don’t like it. But when claims are being made that I would argue have not reached the status of being mainstream scientific consensus, the onus is on the claimer to provide some evidence for the claims. If you want to claim that low sperm counts actually ARE impacting fertility (as opposed to simply innuendo), or likewise that various chemicals are ACTUALLY impacting birth defects (as opposed to the litany of other possibilities we could all name) then you have the obligation to give at least some evidence to bolster your claim.
The interaction of chemicals with human health is a field that attracts every nutcase in America who wants to be noticed, from fluoride to silicone implants to thimerosal, from alar to aspartame to homeopathy — you’ll forgive me if simply being told “I saw it on TV” or “I read it somewhere on the internet” do not convince me of a particular claim.
July 23rd, 2009 at 5:53 pm
It absolutely is mainstream scientific consensus that endocrine disruptors are detrimental to humans and the environment. I haven’t seen conclusive proof that sperm count and endocrine disruptors are linked yet (sperm count varies widely according to demographics and location) but there’s no doubt that endocrine disruptors in water supply are very harmful.
From the journal of endocrinology:
Epigenetic Transgenerational Actions of Endocrine Disruptors
Matthew D. Anway and Michael K. Skinner
From environmental health perspectives:
Cancer and developmental exposure to endocrine disruptors.
by Linda S. Birnbaum , Suzanne E. Fenton
from the same journal:
Developmental effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in wildlife and humans.
T Colborn, F S vom Saal, and A M Soto
And there are hundreds more. A simple, two-second literature search is all it takes to find out that indeed, there is a wealth of scientific evidence out there on this subject.
July 24th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
[...] I mentioned the mounting evidence that high levels of phthalates and other chemicals are responsible for a growing wave of poor [...]