Cat Nabbed

How a common parasite could be killing male fertility

The scale of the reproductive crisis facing humanity is staggering. Truly.

Let’s just look at men’s reproductive health, which—to be just a touch coarse—means their balls and what they do or don’t produce.

A couple of years ago, Professor Shanna Swan, a world-leading expert on reproductive health at Mt. Sinai, New York, published a book in which she predicted mankind could find it impossible to reproduce by natural means within less than a quarter of a century.

On the basis of trends in sperm counts alone, simply by extrapolating current data, Professor Swan was able to show that by 2045, the median man will have a sperm count of zero. What that means is that one half of all men will produce no sperm, and the other half will produce so few, it doesn’t really matter, because they’ll never get a woman pregnant, no matter how hard they try.

This scenario is often dubbed “spermageddon” in the popular media. It’s an amusing, catchy name—perhaps a tad too light-hearted—but if it helps get the issue stuck in people’s heads, that’s good enough for me. Mission accomplished.

Or not really, since that still leaves the huge task of actually doing something to arrest and then reverse the problem. And in fact the problem seems to be getting worse, not better.

In research published since the book—which is called Count Down, by the way, and is well worth reading—Professor Swan has shown that the trends she used to make her prediction of imminent doom just a few years ago are now accelerating. Since the turn of the millennium, declines in sperm counts in the Western world have sped up and, what’s more, the trends that have been well documented among Western men since the middle of the last century are also being mirrored among men outside the West, in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Spermageddon is now even closer than 2045, and there’s no escape from it anywhere on the planet.

So what’s causing this, I hear you ask?

As with any complex problem, there are a variety of different causes. Professor Swan identifies factors like sedentary lifestyles, obesity and bad diet, and smoking as important contributors. But she also draws our attention to the insidious effects of toxic chemicals, and especially a class of chemical called endocrine-disruptors, which are in everything from the food we eat and the water we drink to the deodorant we spray under our arms and sunscreen and soap and even toilet paper. Endocrine-disruptors are chemicals that affect the body’s hormonal (endocrine) system, with a wide range of negative consequences. Research is revealing that endocrine-disruptors are implicated in pretty much every single one of the prevailing diseases of the modern age, everything from heart disease and cancer to Alzheimer’s and autism.

A great many endocrine-disruptors are estrogenic, meaning they mimic the “female” hormone estrogen in the human body, upsetting the crucial balance of sex hormones that determines how we develop sexually. A male fetus exposed to estrogenic chemicals in the womb may end up with undescended testicles, a micropenis and low testosterone, all of which could seriously hinder or flat out prevent his chances of reproducing as an adult.

Thankfully, the fertility crisis has now been made a key focus of Robert F. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, as one of the principal chronic-health threats to the future of the United States, which is most certainly is. (It’s worth remembering, too, that the collapse in birth rates in the US, like the rest of the Western world, remains one of the principal “arguments” in favor of mass immigration. For whatever reasons—whether economic, moral or biological—we simply don’t want to have as many children as our parents and grandparents, so if we still want those very important lines on those very important graphs to keep on climbing, we need to maintain a constant inflow of people from abroad. Or so we’re told, anyway. Patriots will fail to win back their nations unless they can find a way to get their fellow countrymen and -women reproducing at higher than replacement levels—or they must outline a persuasive alternative to the ideology of infinite growth. Personally, I suspect the problem is so deep, and actually has an underlying spiritual aspect, which means the best solution is making our societies comfortable with the idea of no growth or even de-growth, at least in the short-to-medium term.)

Despite the growing focus on the chronic-disease epidemic, and a new willingness to try and tackle it there are still many, many things we don’t know about it and about the fertility crisis in particular.

I was reminded of this a few days ago when I read a new study about the potentially devastating effects on fertility of a common parasite. Scientists discovered that Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite a significant proportion of the human population has acquired, mainly from pet cats, has the ability to decapitate sperm when exposed to them.

Literally: the parasite can chop the heads off sperm when it meets them. And a headless sperm, as you might imagine, is of use to neither man nor beast.