"I have heard that the Chlorine Chemistry Council's budget is
around $100 million...Why
don't they do some research to say what they are doing is safe?"
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This must be the year
of the sperm. The New Yorker magazine ran
a long story January 15th called "Silent Sperm" -- a wry
reference to Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," which made its debut
in the same magazine 35 years ago. "Silent Sperm" describes the 50 percent
loss in sperm count that has occurred in men worldwide during the
past 40 years. Furthermore, the January issue of Esquire
features an article on sperm loss, titled "Downward Motility."
Mother Jones magazine also began the new year with a sperm
story, titled "Down for the Count." And the nation's newspaper
of record, the New York Times, ran a 4-part, front-page series on
increasing infertility in the U.S. January 7-10.
By far the most interesting and informative of these articles are
by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker and Daniel Pinchbeck in
Esquire. Wright and Pinchbeck interviewed dozens of prominent
researchers in the field of endocrinology (hormones) and
reproductive health in the U.S., Britain and Europe, and their
articles offer new human perspectives.
Here are some of the new viewpoints on this issue:
Danish pediatric endocrinologist (hormone specialist) Niels E.
Skakkebaek says that, in the late 1980s, "We had also been
wondering why it was so difficult for sperm banks to establish a
core of donors. In some areas of Denmark, they were having to
recruit ten potential donors to find one with good semen
quality."
So Skakkebaek in 1990 studied sperm quality in Danish men. He
started with men working in nonhazardous office jobs and laborers
who did not work directly with industrial chemicals or pesticides
--men thought to be healthy. For decades it had been believed
that the average man produced about a hundred million sperm per
milliliter of semen, and of that about 20 percent was expected to be
immobile. Skakkebaek reported that 84 percent of the Danish men he
studied had sperm quality below the standards set by the World
Health Organization. The men themselves seemed normal in every
other respect.
On the basis of the world's medical literature, Skakkebaek
calculates that in 1940 the average sperm count was 113 million
per milliliter, and that 50 years later it had fallen to 66
million.
Still more serious is a three-fold increase in men whose sperm
count was below 20 million -- the point at which their fertility
would be jeopardized.
In the United States, just as in Denmark, the number of donors
with good-quality sperm has become distressingly low. As early
as 1981, researchers at the Washington Fertility Study Center
reported that sperm count of their donors, who were largely
medical students, had suffered a steady decline over the previous
eight years. The researchers worried that, if the decline
continued at the same rate, within the decade there would be no
potential donors who could meet the approved or recommended
standards.
The fact is that the number of morphologically normal sperm
[meaning sperm with a normal shape] produced by the average man
has dropped below the level of those of a hamster, which has
testicles a fraction the size of a man's.
In the United States, according to the National Center for
Health Statistics, the percentage of infertile couples has risen
from 14.4 in 1965 to 18.5 in 1995. Infertility is defined as
failure to produce a child after a year of normal sex.
There has been little published research comparing racial and
ethnic sperm counts, particularly in Africa and many Third World
countries. But the studies that we do have show low counts nearly
everywhere: the latest count in Nigeria is 64 million per
milliliter; in Pakistan, 79.5 million; in Germany, 78 million; in
Hong Kong, 62 million.
Pierre Jouannet, director of the Centre d'Etude et de
Conservation des Oeufs et du Sperme in Paris, simply did not
believe Skakkebaek's conclusions. Jouannet had data on 1350
Parisian men, all of whom had fathered at least one child and
therefore were of proven fertility, so he analyzed them,
expecting to refute Skakkebaek's studies. To his astonishment he
found that sperm counts in his group had dropped steadily at 2 percent
per year for the past 20 years; in 1973 the average count was 89
million per milliliter and in 1992 it was 60 million.
The expected sperm count for a Parisian man born in 1945 was
102 million, whereas the count of those born in 1962 was exactly
half that number.
Jouannet has become convinced. And when he projects the
decline into the future, he sees serious trouble for the human
species. He says gravely, at the present rate of decline, "It
will take 70 or 80 years before it [sperm count] goes to
zero." [Difficulty conceiving occurs at 20 million or
less; sterility occurs at five million or less.]
Stewart Irvine, a gynecologist at the Medical Research
Council's Reproductive Biology Unit in Edinburgh, Scotland,
studied sperm production of Scottish males. Men born in the
1940s had an average sperm count of 128 million, whereas those
born in the second half of the 1960s averaged only 75 million -- a
decline of over 40 percent in a single generation.
Irvine told Lawrence Wright, "I had a colleague visiting from
Australia, and he had with him a laptop computer with lots of
data from infertile couples. He said, 'I'm sure these sperm
count drops are rubbish. I'm sure there are other explanations
for it.' And I said, 'Well, just take your data and plot it by
year of birth and see what you get.' He got the same
result."
"Infertility is definitely going up," says Dr. Marc Goldstein,
director of the Center for Male Reproductive Medicine at New York
Hospital. "I see it in my practice. There is a decline in
fertility in men and an increase in infertility in older couples.
Studies show an increase in infertility from 11 percent to 16
percent in all married couples." He believes part of it may be
life style: marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, and sexually transmitted
diseases can all reduce sperm counts.
But wildlife do not smoke marijuana or drink alcohol and there
are numerous reports of reproductive problems caused by
chlorinated chemicals in wildlife.
Niels Skakkebaek, the Danish researcher, believes it is
something more fundamental than life style. Whatever is
happening to men, he believes, some part of it must take place
during the early stages of human development--in the womb or else
shortly after birth--because damage to the male urogenital system
is evident in certain very young patients.
Likewise, Richard M. Sharpe, a research physiologist with the
Medical Research Council in Edinburgh, Scotland, thinks that the
decline in sperm is linked to some event that affects the
endocrine system, which governs the body's hormones. This must
happen, he believes, either in the womb or shortly after birth.
"I have absolutely no doubt this is the most important time in
your life, certainly if you're a male," he says. "This is when
your sperm-producing capacity as an adult is settled once and for
all." Changes in life style won't help men whose
sperm-producing capacity has been crippled at birth.
In a series of experiments, Sharpe exposed pregnant rats to
"minute quantities" of DES and to other synthetic estrogens
[female sex hormones]; he showed a 5 to 15 percent decline in sperm
count in male offspring when they matured. [DES, or
diethylstilbestrol, is a synthetic female sex hormone that was
given medically to women in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s; many
of their male offspring have reduced sperm counts.]
Philippe Grandjean, a professor of environmental medicine at
Odense University in Denmark summarized the situation nicely in
an interview with Lawrence Wright: "We thought in the past that
these toxic substances would act on a target -- an enzyme or DNA or
the cell membrane, or something like that. But what these
endocrinologists have suggested to us is that industrial
chemicals can actually mimic hormones. It looks as if the
receptors aren't very good at recognizing what's a hormone and
what's not a hormone -- perhaps because they were never previously
challenged. These receptors have been kept almost unchanged in
the mammalian world, because they worked. They functioned very
well. But in this century we have generated all these new
chemicals and injected them into the envi-ronment, and suddenly
the body is exposed to new substances that in some cases can
interact with that receptor. The human species is totally
unprepared for this, because it has never happened before. I
think the perspective is both very exciting and very, very
frightening."
Most -- though not all -- of the estrogen-mimicking chemicals
involve chlorine.
If, as Theo Colborn theorizes, the number of chemicals that
can harm reproduction add up to hundreds, if not thousands, the
only way to regulate them all will be to "reverse the onus" that
now falls on individuals to prove they have been harmed by a
toxic substance. "The responsibility should not be on the people
exposed to chemicals to prove they have been hurt," says David
LaRoche, the secretary of the International Joint Commission
(IJC). "The responsibility should be on industry to prove that
chemicals cause no harm."
"I have heard that the Chlorine Chemistry Council's budget is
around $100 million," Gordon Durnil told Daniel Pinchbeck.
Durnil is the former chairman of the IJC and author of "The Making of a Conservative Environmentalist." "It's
a lot of money. You could use it to buy some research. Why
don't they do some research to say what they are doing is safe?"
Durnil asks.
Unfortunately, the truth about the sperm count is that it is
under attack from many different sources. Dioxin, for example, is
a chlorinated chemical that does not mimic hormones. Yet it
diminishes sperm count in male animals.
Earl Gray, a senior research biologist with U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA), testified before Congress in 1993 that,
"Our studies [in rats] show that a single dose of dioxin
administered during pregnancy permanently reduces sperm counts in
the males by about 60 per cent."
"With sperm counts, I've been more impressed by the dioxins
and the PCBs than by the estrogens and anti-androgens," Gray
said. "We get surprising effects at relatively low
doses."
"Probably half the jobs in the world are associated in some
way with chlorine," says Gordon Durnil. "As a society, we are
going to have to confront our dependence on this
chemical."
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