Sperm count drop the least of our worries
WORLD VIEW ‘‘I tried counting mine once, but I went blind with exhaustion,’’ tweeted one reader of the BBC website after it reported that sperm counts were down by half in the past 40 years all over the developed world. And it’s true: they are hard to count. The little buggers just won’t stay still.
The report, published by Human Reproduction Update is the work of Israeli, American, Danish, Spanish and Brazilian researchers who reviewed almost 200 studies done in different places and times since 1973. It’s called ‘‘Temporal trends in sperm count: a systematic review and metaregression analysis’’, and the authors are working very hard to get the world’s attention.
Dr Hagai Levine, the lead researcher, told the BBC that if the trend continued humans would become extinct. ‘‘If we will not change the ways that we are living and the environment and the chemicals that we are exposed to, I am very worried about what will happen in the future,’’ he said. ‘‘Eventually we may have a problem with reproduction in general, and it may be the extinction of the human species.’’
I think I’ve seen this movie a few times already. There was Children of Men, and then The Handmaid’s Tale, and I was even in a sperm-count movie myself 30 years ago. (It was a would-be comedy called The Last Straw, but happily it isn’t available online.)