hey man, most men don't care about the sperm as much as the act of sex itself.
;-)
------------------------
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Louis Proyect [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Monday, October 07, 2002 8:22 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [PEN-L:30980] Oil and sperm
>
>
> Jim Devine:
>
> >I don't see why the obvious lust for oil has to be based on
> a view that
> >"oil is running out." Lots of people, including yours truly,
> have a lust
> >for sex without assuming that "sex is running out."
>
> But in a certain sense sex *is* running out, for reasons
> parallel to the
> LONG-TERM energy crisis (as opposed to short-term spikes in
> supply and demand).
>
> http://www.rachel.org/search/index.cfm?St=1
>
> #477 - Sperm in the News, January 18, 1996
>
> This must be the year of the sperm. The NEW YORKER magazine
> ran a long
> story[1] January 15th called "Silent Sperm" --a wry reference
> to Rachel
> Carson's SILENT SPRING, which made its debut in the NEW
> YORKER 35 years
> ago. "Silent Sperm" describes the 50% 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,[2] titled "Downward
> Motility." MOTHER JONES magazine[3] 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 on
> the scientific
> information we have been presenting since 1991 (see REHW
> #263, #264, #323,
> #343, #365, #372, #377, #432, #438, #446, #447, #448).
>
> Here are some viewpoints that we have not previously offered
> our readers in
> our own coverage of 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."[1,pg.43]
>
> ** 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% was expected to be immobile. Skakkebaek reported that 84%
> 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.[1,pg.43]
>
> ** 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. [1,pg.44]
>
> ** 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.[1,pg.44]
>
> ** 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.[1,pg.44]
>
> ** 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.[1,pg.44]
>
> ** 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.[1,pg.44]
>
> ** 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.[1,pgs.44-45]
>
> ** 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% per year for the past 20 years; in 1973 the average
> count was 89
> million per milliliter and in 1992 it was 60 million. [1,pg.45]
>
> ** 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.[1,pg.45]
>
> ** 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."[1,pg.45] [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% 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."[1,pg.46]
>
> ** "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. [2,pg.80]
>
> ** 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.[1,pg.47]
>
> ** 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."[1,pg.48]
> 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% 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.][1,pg.48]
>
> ** 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."[1,pg.51]
>
> ** 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."[2,pg.84]
>
> ** "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. (See REHW #423, #424.) "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.[2,pg.84]
>
> ** 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."[1,pg.53]
>
> ** "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."[1,pg.53]
>
> ** "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."[2,pg.82]
>
> --Peter Montague
>
> =====
>
> [1] Lawrence Wright, "Silent Sperm," NEW YORKER (January 15,
> 1996), pgs.
> 42-48, 50-53, 55.
>
> [2] Daniel Pinchbeck, "Downward Motility," ESQUIRE (January
> 1996), pgs. 79-84.
>
> [3] Michael Castleman, "Down for the Count," MOTHER JONES
> (January/February
> 1996), pgs. 20-21.
>
>
>
>
>
> Louis Proyect
> www.marxmail.org
>
>
