Just imagine with me for a moment if it were found that something we occurring in the environment which was resulting in a 60 percent decrease in women’s breast size over the past forty years. Or maybe a 40 percent decrease in eggs.
This would be front page news. This would be the crisis of all crises. The front of the war on women.But what’s actually happening is that the total sperm count among Western men fell 59.3 percent from 1973 to 2011, according to new research.
Soooooo…not much of a ballyhoo.
The New York Times did report on it in their Health section:
The sperm count of men in Western countries has been declining precipitously with no signs of “leveling off,” according to new research, bolstering a school of thought that male health in the modern world is at risk, possibly threatening fertility.
By examining thousands of studies and conducting a meta-analysis of 185 — the most comprehensive effort to date — an international team of researchers ultimately looked at semen samples from 42,935 men from 50 countries from 1973 to 2011.
They found that sperm concentration — the number of sperm per milliliter of semen — had declined each year, amounting to a 52.4 percent total decline, in men from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Total sperm count among the same group also tumbled each year for a total decline of 59.3 percent over the nearly 40-year period.
Decreasing sperm count was first reported a quarter century ago, but the new analysis shows that “this decline is strong and continuing,” said Dr. Shanna H. Swan, one of the study’s authors and a professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.
And while this paper offers the most data yet on a subject of lengthy debate, it is far from settled, as the cause and the impact on fertility — and whether it has any real-life consequence — remain unknown.
They throw out that it might be mothers smoking or perhaps chemicals used on plastic but they don’t mention the long held belief by some that birth control chemicals in the water are causing changes to male’s bodies. No. That would take some…uhm…testicular fortitude as some say. And…low sperm count.
Something tells me that this would be treated as more of a crisis if most NY Times reporters and editors didn’t secretly think it was a good thing because maybe…just maybe it’ll mean less babies. And that’s always a good thing.
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