"Running out of ammunition

In her new book Count Down, Dr. Shana Swan of the Icahn School of Medicine says that declining sperm ratios and changes in sexual development are posing a danger as serious as the climate crisis. If the trend continues, the human race will run out of "ammunition" by 2045.

Dr. Shana Swan is an epidemiologist who studies the impact of the environment on human development, looking for links between diseases and potential causative factors such as lung cancer and smoking. But their work doesn't determine the cause of disease 100%, it simply looks for two things to be associated.

▲ How Count Down's modern world threatens sperm counts, alters reproductive development in both men and women, and jeopardizes the future of humanity

Professor Swan's ideas stem from an exhaustive study published in 2017, in their top academic journal Human Reproduction Express.

They conducted a large-scale investigation into changes in human male sperm counts. Up to 185 analyses were conducted on sperm samples from 45,000 men from various countries, including Europe and Australia.

It was then found that in the 40 years between 1973 and 2011, the total number of male sperm dropped by more than 59% and sperm concentration dropped by 52.4%.

But its data only included men in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

▲ - Dr. Shana Swan

That means Western men now have half the sperm count relative to their grandfather's generation, with male sperm concentrations of about 99 million/ml 40 years ago and 47.1 million/ml today.

Researchers believe: If the trend is not curbed, at this rate, by 2045 the sperm count may fall to zero, and will be able to do natural fertility again.

And what about the situation in China?

Some scholars conducted a quality analysis of nearly 9,000 sperm from 2008 to 2018 through seven sperm banks located in five regions of the country: east, south, west, north, and central.

The results found that: the volume of semen decreased significantly, the total number of sperm decreased by an average of 36.88%, and the percentage of normal-form sperm also decreased from 28.46±6.66% to 16.46±9.10%.

According to the authoritative report of a domestic sperm bank, the normal adult male sperm qualification rate is less than 30%. The Institute of Science and Technology of the National Population and Family Planning Commission has published data also showing that the quality of Chinese men's semen, is declining at a rate of 1% per year.

Dr. Swan says in his book that this happens because of our increasing exposure to chemicals. Examples are bis phenol A (BAP), phosphates, and per- and chlorofluorocarbon substances (PAS).

It is well documented that BAP affects sperm count, sperm activity, and sperm malformation rate. Chinese scientists have also conducted a study specifically on the effects of BAP on male endocrine secretion using humans as test subjects.

In this study, men who were exposed to BAP in factories for more than 5 years were compared with men who were not exposed to BAP within 5 years.

The men exposed to BAP had four times the risk of erectile dysfunction and seven times the risk of ejaculatory difficulties than the other group.

Since 2009, when the United States began to pay attention to the effects of BAP on human health, countries have been evaluating the dangers of BAP, and repeatedly BAP regulation constraints, the EU, the United States, China, and other food touch children's products in BAP banned.

And phosphates can interfere with the endocrine, so men's semen volume and sperm count, reduce sperm vitality, this is a sperm deformity, serious can lead to testicular cancer.

What is even more alarming is that these chemicals are almost everywhere and are very common plastic additives.

For example, bis phenol A is one of the most widely used industrial compounds in the world, mainly used in the production of poly carbonate, epoxy resin, and many other polymer materials. It is mostly used in the manufacture of plastic bottles, chippy cups for young children, and the inner coating of food and beverage cans.

Every year, 27 million tons of plastics containing BAP are produced worldwide. It can be said that mineral water bottles, medical devices, and the inside of food packaging, can be exposed to them.

The phosphates that follow are commonly used in toys, food packaging materials, cleaning agents, lubricants, nail polish, hair sprays, soaps, and shampoos.

PAS is also commonly used in products with non-stick properties due to their hydrophobic and oleo phobic properties, including non-stick pans, waterproof jackets, firefighting foams, and even disposable paper cups and pizza boxes.

To protect the "bullet", we need to prevent these chemicals from entering the body directly from the mouth. For this reason, it is better to use fewer plastic utensils, especially when heating try to use glass or ceramic utensils.

But even so, we still can not avoid eating these chemicals, after all, micro plastics have been everywhere. These plastic fragments and particles are less than 5 mm in diameter, and there are a large number of persistent organic pollutants such as bis phenol A.

Monitoring results show that the average number of floating litter in the surface waters of China's oceans in 2019 was 4,027 pieces per square kilometre. These tiny pieces of plastic are making their way into our bodies from the water system, and the food chain, unknowingly.

Trying to solve this problem will require either evolution or finding non-toxic alternatives to take the place of plastic in human life, but either way is difficult to think about.

In addition, overwork, late nights, smoking, drinking, lack of exercise, obesity, and also continue to affect people's health. Perhaps the only optimal choice for humans is to leave natural reproduction behind. But in our country, the assisted reproduction industry still has a long way to go.