IVF ‘is absurd response by NHS to male fertility crisis’

WOMEN hoping to be mothers are being given needless and invasive IVF treatment because their infertile partners are ignored by the NHS, an expert has warned.

Infertile men are not being diagnosed or looked after properly within the health system, said Professor Sheena Lewis.

And she said it was ‘absurd’ that women were being given IVF to tackle the problem.

Her comments come as the average sperm count of men in the west has fallen almost 60 per cent in a generation, scientists reported last year. They warned it could lead to the ‘ extinction of the human species’. Professor Lewis said women routinely have IVF when there is nothing wrong with their own fertility, while male infertility is now the most common reason for couples in the UK to seek IVF. It also costs couples up to £5,000 on average when they go to private clinics.

Speaking to the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme, Professor Lewis said: ‘The woman actually acts as the therapy for the man’s problem. We are giving an invasive procedure to a person who doesn’t need it in order to treat another person. That doesn’t happen in any other branch of medicine.’

Experts say up to one in five men in Britain are ‘sub-fertile’, which means their sperm count is low enough to affect their ability to have a baby. The fall in male fertility seen in Western countries has been blamed on obesity, stress and chemical compounds such as bisphenol A in water bottles and inside food cans .

Professor Lewis, an expert in reproductive medicine at Queen’s University Belfast, said the failure of health services to focus on male infertility is an ‘urgent’ problem, adding: ‘Men are not being looked after properly, not diagnosed, and not cared for.’ A review of 85 studies published last year found the average sperm count of men from Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand had fallen by 59.3 per cent from 1973 to 2011.

Dr Hagai Levine, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said at the time: ‘Eventually we may have a problem, and with reproduction in general, and it may be the extinction of the human species.’

Some experts say GPs tend to offer IVF because they don’t know what other treatments or tests are available to couples.

In the programme airing today, Victoria Derbyshire spoke to a man whose wife underwent IVF.

He sought help from a private clinic and had surgery to treat varicocele – swollen veins in the testicles which often affect men with fertility problems. After the operation, which was cheaper than IVF, he and his wife conceived naturally.