Are endocrine disruptors reducing human sperm count, killing off the species?
“You have to read this,” my brother said. “It shows how the human race is dying out.” Dubious, I opened the book that he offered me and stared incredulously at a little-known statistic stating that “average male sperm counts dropped by almost fifty percent between 1938 and 1990.” The book was entitled “Our Stolen Future” and was my first introduction to class of chemical compounds known as “endocrine disruptors” and the effect that they are having on our fertility and the fertility of many species across the globe. The discovery that human sperm counts had been steadily dropping occurred in 1992, when the results of Danish researcher Dr. Niels Skakkebaek’s meta-analysis on male fertility was published in the British Medical Journal. Analyzing the findings of every study on sperm count that had occurred since 1930, Dr. Skakkebaek uncovered this surprising trend when he realized the combined evidence of all these studies pointed to an average decline in male sperm count by 1 percent per
