HEALTH-ENVIRONMENT: Chemical Thugs Blamed for Reduced Sperm Count

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SAN FRANCISCO, Mar 26 1996 (IPS) - Tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals may be reducing the human sperm count and destroying the health of hundreds of animal species, asserts a new book published by Penguin.

‘Our Stolen Future’ synthesises material from hundreds of research papers of the last few decades. It says the rogue chemicals include the pesticide DDT, industrial coolants like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and the contraceptive cream nonoxynol-9.

Some of these chemicals show up in food and in plastic food wrapping. Others, like dioxins, are the unwanted by-products of such industrial processes as paper bleaching and waste incineration, says the book whose main author Theo Colborn is a scientist at the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF).

Studies collected by Danish researcher Niels Skakkebaek show that sperm counts for men in a number of European countries have dropped by half in the last 30 years, and that sperm counts in rapidly industrialising countries in East Asia are falling fast.

The book’s authors say researchers have failed to notice spectacular changes in people because most medical studies focus on cancer rather than on reproductive problems.

“There may be fates worse than extinction,” the authors say. “Humans in their relentless quest for dominance over nature may be inadvertently undermining their own ability to reproduce or to learn and think.”

Thus people exposed to high doses of industrial chemicals may not die, but the same people may be sterile or bear children with such deformities as shrunken penises or learning disabilities.

This is because these chemicals “mimic” or “block” estrogen and progesterone — natural hormones which instruct the body on how it should develop.

“Hormonally active, synthetically active chemicals are thugs on the biological information highway that sabotage vital communication,” says the book. “They mug the messengers or impersonate them. They jam signals. They scramble messages.”

The authors use simple examples to illustrate their point:

“Imagine what would happen if somebody disrupted communications during the construction of a large building, so the plumbers did not get the message to install the pipes in half the bathrooms before the carpenters closed the building.”

Now imagine that the chemicals that affect communications in life systems are everywhere — “in the finest caviar, in penguins in Antarctica, in the bluefin tuna served at a sushi bar in Tokyo, in the monsoon rains that fall on Calcutta, in the milk of a nursing mother in France, in the blubber of a sperm whale cruising the South Pacific.”

The book throws in a couple more alarming facts: The amount of the chemicals required to disrupt reproduction cycles could be as low as one part in a trillion. The authors say this is a level similar to just one drop of liquid in the cars of a 10-km long cargo train.

Now note that billions of kilogrammes of these chemicals are pumped annually into the air, land and water.

Finally, there is the fact that concentration of many of these chemicals increases as they climb up the food chain. As people, bears and other large animals eats smaller animals, the predator acquires several times more pollutants than its prey. The chemicals are “persistent” and do not break down.

Albatrosses in the middle of the Pacific and polar bears in the Arctic circle were the last creatures scientists expected to be threatened by industrial chemicals because they live so far from human activity.

When the albatross population suffered a three percent drop in reproduction rates over the last few years, New Zealand researchers looking for possible causes discovered abnormally high levels of industrial chemicals in the birds’ bodies.

Reproduction among polar bears has also dropped by more than half, researchers say. Norwegian researchers believe this may be because the levels of toxic chemicals in the bears are three billion times higher than the cold waters in which they live.

Colborn and her co-authors believe that these chemicals could be behind the disappearance of a number of species around the world, including the golden toad in Costa Rica, panthers in the Florida Everglades, otters in England and dolphins off the coast of Turkey.

The authors say that other impacts of these chemicals could include the 400 percent increase in ectopic pregnancies among women in the United States, the 32 percent rise in breast cancer rates, and the 126 percent increase in prostate cancers among men in recent years.

Unfortunately, say the authors, scientists are spending most of their research efforts looking for cures while failing to develop proper monitoring systems.

This means that “as we race toward the future, we are flying blind,” say the authors.

“Instead of being able to provide a reliable radar system, scientists are peering through the cockpit window trying to warn of any obstacles ahead,” according to the book. “The most they can say is that the dark mass looming into view might be a cloud bank. Or then again it may be a mountain.”

Some environmentalists say that Colborn and her colleagues fail to point out that scientists do not research these subjects because much of the funds for medical research come from companies which manufacture synthetic chemicals.

“The book should have gone further,” says David Hunter, a lawyer with the Centre for International Environmental Law. “We need to know who makes these chemicals that are destroying our future. We need to make these companies accountable.”

Others are sceptical of the new book.

A New York Times article on the book last week was headlined, “Sperm Counts: Some Experts See a Fall, Others Poor Data.”

The Times quoted Michael Gallo of Rutgers University as saying that the new book was “hypothesis masked as fact.”

But Peter Montague, editor of the Maryland-based Rachel’s Environment and Health Weekly, points out that many of the scientists quoted by the Times reported similar findings to the newspaper in the past.

“Everyone — I mean everyone — should read this book, and everyone should give a copy to their family doctor,” says Montague.

U.S. Vice President Al Gore calls it a “critically important book.”

“For the sake of our children and our grandchildren, we must urgently seek the answers,” Gore wrote in the foreword to the book.