Israeli Sperm Count Drops A Whopping Forty Percent

(Israeli hightech entrepeneur Yossi Vardi delivers a TED Talk about the dangers of blogging for men. An inconvenient truth called Local Warming.)

It could be something out of the worst nightmare of a Woody Allen flick like “Everything you wanted to know about sex but are afraid to ask.”

But there may be truth in some recent findings about a radical reduction in male sperm count by Dr. Ronit Haimov Kochman from Hadassah Hospital’s Mt. Scopus campus in Jerusalem.

The study was conducted between 2004 and 2008, and found that the amount of sperm in Israeli males who took part in the study has dropped by a whopping 40% over a decade earlier. Environmental factors, including cell phone use, are to blame.

Why this has happened appears to be due to a number reasons including changes in diet (more use of alcohol, eating fast foods, etc.) as well as increased use of cellular phones.

The increased use of cell phones appear to be one of the most acute reasons for loss of male sperm count, that in males studied, dropped from 107 million sperm cells per cubic cm of “test fluid,” or semen, to only 67 million. That means a drop of the little squiggly rascals of around 40%.

Radiation from cell phones, especially those carried in one pockets (hey, where else are we going to carry one?) seem to be especially good at zapping the li’l critters; but even the water the people drink seems to have an effect as well.

What’s even more worrisome is that not only the number of sperm has dropped significantly but the quality as well; which could have an effect on ones with XY chromosomes that are supposed to involved in producing male offspring and are said to be more vulnerable to conditions while en route to the ova in the female body.

Dr. Haimov-Kochman went on to say that if this keeps up, male sperm count will be down to only around 20 million per cubic cm by the year 2030, which will have a definite effect on human reproduction.

It also appears that hormone imbalance may also be a factor as too much female estrogen hormones also has a role in problems dealing with human reproduction. Many men acquire female estrogen hormones when they get older which often accounts for problems with the prostate gland, larger breasts in men, and even prostate cancer. The increase in estrogen hormones, including that in women also seems to be effected by diet, including eating certain fruits and animals given estrogen to increase milk production. And of course, the use of estrogen-packed birth control pills used by women, and which make their way to our drinking water, isn’t helping the situation either.

Prof. Levenfeld, head of the Israel Fertility Institute at Beersheva’s Soroka Medical Center, added that there appears to be an overall reduction in male sperm counts and sperm quality all over the world, also as the result of conditions similar to those in Israeli men involved in the study.

Before making definite conclusions, however, Prof. Levenfeld suggested that studies be made on a new group of test subjects who don’t zap their privates with cell phone radiation and who eat a more healthy diet. If anyone reading this article saw the movie Children of Men which portrayed a childless world in about the year 2030, the future might seem be very chilling indeed.