[wanabidii] A Shortage of sperm

Many years ago, when I was young and handsome, a friend inveigled me
into taking a small role in a film he was making – a proper film, with
a real budget and a commercial release, though mercifully it never got
much attention. It was a Cold War spoof called "The Last Straw" in
which the Soviets were plotting to bring the West to its knees by
causing the sperm count in Western males to collapse, and I got the Dr
Strangelove role.

This friend – let's call him Giles Walker, because that was his name –
picked me for the role because at the time I was known for making
weighty prognostications on the strategic balance and matters
pertaining thereto. (You have to make a living.) So I played myself,
briefing the leaders of the Free World on the appalling strategic
consequences if the Soviet plot succeeded.

You cannot even find this film on YouTube now, I'm pleased to report.
However, it did give me a head-start on considering the appalling
consequences of a drastic fall in the sperm count of Western men. This
comes in handy at the moment, since that is now actually happening.

In the fifteen years between 1989 and 2005, according to a study just
published in the journal Human Reproduction, the sperm count of French
men fell by one third. More than 26,000 men were tested in the study,
and the number of millions of spermatozoa per millilitre of their
semen was falling by almost 2 percent a year. If that rate of decline
has been maintained since the study ended, the count will be down
another 13 percent by now.

Now, admittedly, counting sperm is tricky. You can fit a hundred
million of the little buggers into a teaspoon, they all look alike,
and they keep wriggling around. But these results being taken very
seriously because they don't have the usual defects of this sort of
study.

Most studies on sperm counts use data from men who donate sperm for
artificial insemination centres (who are chosen for their high
fertility), and/or from couples who are having trouble conceiving
(which may be due to an abnormally low sperm count in the male
partner). In neither case is it a genuinely representative sample.

The virtue of the French study is that the country has the Fivnat
database, a record of some 440,000 cases of infertility problems at
126 government-funded "assisted fertilisation centres" from the 1980s
onwards. The researchers chose only the 26,200 cases where the problem
had proved to be complete sterility in the female partner – which
presumably meant that their male partners were a random sample of the
population.

Treatment for infertility is free in France, so there should be no
income bias in the data either. For those reasons it is probably the
most reliable survey of changing sperm counts over time that has ever
been done – and it documents a steep fall in a relatively short time.

The numbers are quite impressive: from 73.6 million sperm per
millilitre in 1989 to only 49.9 million per millilitre in 2005. If the
rate of decline has stayed the same since 2005, the number now would
be around 43 million. Doctors generally regard 15 million as the
number below which there will be serious problems with fertility, so
there's another 40 years or so before the problem gets really serious.
But still...

There are really three questions here. One, is the same thing
happening elsewhere? Two, what's causing it? And three, how much does
it matter?

Most other scientific studies in developed countries in the past
twenty years have also found falling sperm counts, though none of them
matched the French one in scale and precision. There is no comparable
research on the trend in developing countries, but it is at least
plausible that this may be a global phenomenon.

That mostly depends, of course, on what's causing it. If it's
environmental factors, are they the same in rich countries and poor
ones? A common theory lays the blame on chemicals in the environment
like Bisphenol A, found in some plastics, that disrupt endocrine
function and change hormonal balances. Another theory blames smoking,
drinking alcohol, and high-fat diets. These factors vary from one
country to another, and more research is clearly needed.

But let us suppose that the trend is continuing, and that sperm counts
are also declining in developing countries. Should you lie awake at
night worrying that this is a threat to human survival?

Definitely not. If you're really worried about keeping human numbers
up, then you should be doing something quite different at night. And
afterwards, you might lull yourself to sleep pondering whether it
would really be such a bad thing if the birth rate dropped for a
while.

If this decline in sperm counts is caused by environmental factors,
then it can almost certainly be reversed eventually by doing enough
research and then eliminating those factors. In the meantime, however,
we are passing through the astounding total of seven billion humans
beings, on our way to nine or ten billion.

That's far too many for this finite planet, and a rapid decline in the
birth rate, even to below replacement level, would be a Good Thing.
http://www.bnltimes.com/index.php/sunday-times/headlines/columns/377-view-from-a-low-orbit/12958-a-shortage-of-sperm

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