Plastics, penises, and reproduction: Three strikes and we're out!

 

I have two minds about the subject matter I’ve been exploring lately.  With yet another shut down on the island and nations squabbling over the vaccines who am I to try to add another dimension of misery to the mix.  But I feel compelled to do so because, well...nobody else is doing it. 

 

In my last two posts I talked about how chemicals produced by the manufacture of plastics was showing up in human baby’s placenta and how these same substances were causing the birth of male babies with unusually small and deformed penises. I called these emerging developments to be the first and second strikes by Mother Nature and Her attempts to call attention to the danger human reproduction is actually in. She is striving mightily to remind us that when any species faces such serious reproduction problems the end is neigh. Moth Nature’s third strike is the rapidly increasing drop in male sperm count.

 

The decrease in the human male sperm count is not exactly new.  It was first brought to my attention by a book entitled “Our Stolen Future” (1996), which is about the scientific discovery of endocrine disruption, and which I’ve written about previously. In my opinion, this book is still the best information out there on how chemicals used in manufacturing and agriculture are changing the reproduction systems of humans. The authors start off the book telling us about scientists who began noticing for the first time new peculiar mating patterns among wild life in the 1970s and 80s. They found curious changes in the behaviour of the bald eagles of Florida, while across the pond the Brits were wondering why the otters were vanishing from the rivers and streams in England. Researchers in southern California found that large numbers of female seagulls were nesting with other females rather than the usual male-female parings. But it was researchers at the University of Florida who began trapping alligators in waterways after a chemical spill that showed 60 per cent of the alligators had abnormally small penises, even after the waterways were cleaned up. 

 

What does this all have to do with human reproduction? After all, human males aren’t birds, or otters, or alligators. No, but does point to what the more recent researches are now finding in human babies as reported in my last post entitled “Three Strikes and We’re out!”  In that post I report on the work of Dr. Shanna Swan who has found that sperm counts among men were falling drastically in the western world (and what I called Mother Nature’s ‘third strike’). Dr. Shawn shows us that sperm counts among men living in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand fell 59% from 1973 to 2011. And she leaves us with this warning...”At the current rate , half of the men in those countries would have no sperm by 2045 while many would have very low counts.”

 

2045? That’s roughly 25 years from now. Dr. Swan is telling us that in 25 years half of the men of the western world will be sterile and the other half with sperm that is just barely limply along. Men where the hell are you on this? Your ability to create life is being stolen away without a murmur of protest from anyone, much less men.  What about protesting, if not for yourself, for your infant sons, and grandsons, nephews, and indeed for the entire world. While the western world is not the whole world, it is a warning about what faces all of us humans on the planet. Like it or not, the human race is going nowhere without sperm.