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if you look at the sperm concentrations
when we last looked at them which was
samples collected in 2011 the sperm
concentration in western countries was
47 million per milliliter down from 99
million per milliliter 39 years earlier
so that's a decline of more than one
percent per year and it would predict
between 2011 and now which is 10 years
that we would be now below 40 million
per milliliter
and that's an important number because
below 40 it becomes increasingly
difficult for couples to become pregnant
and how low it's going to go before we
wake up and say we have to stop this i
don't know how long that's going to take
but it's urgent
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however then there's a whole other class
of things which
are not so easy to control and those are
the chemicals in our environment that
come in the products that we bring into
our home
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coatings is a big category and you can
coat a pan with teflon or non-stick you
can coat a jacket with water repellent
you can coat a paper to keep oil from
passing through it say in a pizza box so
coatings are a real concern because they
contain one class of chemicals the
pifoas then another big class and the
one that i've studied a lot is the
chemicals that make plastic soft and
those are the phthalates
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phthalates as a class
are called anti-androgens
wherever they meet testosterone they
tend to decrease it and most
dramatically in the womb in early
pregnancy
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one particular way that we see that is
the
size of the genital area which is called
the anogenital distance then when the
boy grows up he will have we've shown a
lower sperm count besides having an
impact on sperm count it can increase
the risk of genital defects undescended
testicles for example and later it
actually can increase the risk of
testicular cancer
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we looked at pesticides metabolites in
their urine and how they related to the
sperm count
concentration and shape of those sperm
we found that there was a big difference
in sperm count and quality the most
dramatic was that men who were living in
central missouri which is an
agricultural area where there's a lot of
corn and soy grown a lot of pesticides
used they had only half
as many moving sperm
as men in minneapolis
this is huge half as many and they were
not workers and they were just residents
of the area
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low sperm count is related to
all kinds of morbidities including heart
disease diabetes reproductive cancers
and ultimately length of life
it's always assumed that it's the
woman's
responsibility fault if a couple can't
get pregnant or if a woman has
miscarriage and now we know that it's a
shared responsibility and getting the
quality of the eggs is much more
difficult than for a man to count his
sperm or get the quality of his sperm
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more and more people are now considering
storing their sperm freezing their eggs
long-term storage because
we're in a crisis very large and
increasing number of children are
conceived by assisted reproduction and
increasing number of people are using
surrogates for their pregnancies we are
already in the throes of a really really
serious situation
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he could think about lowering his
exposures by changing his shopping
habits he could maybe lose weight if
he's overweight he could stop smoking if
that's a problem he could stop binge
drinking if he does that it's much much
harder to get the chemicals out of our
bodies the good news is
that the many of them are short lived
chemicals that is non-persistent they
leave our body on with a half-life of
four hours six hours so very quickly so
if we could be aware of what's coming in
and stop it then pretty soon we can
clean that up
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we need to test chemicals before they're
put into the marketplace we need to test
the thousands of chemicals that have
never been tested because they've been
assumed safe and we now know they're not
there's no question that environmental
factors affect reproductive function
we're in a crisis a really really
serious situation
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you