A prolonged decline in male fertility in the form of sperm concentrations appears to be connected to the use of pesticides, according to a study published Wednesday.
Researchers compiled, rated and reviewed the results of 25 studies of certain pesticides and male fertility and found that men who had been exposed to certain classes of pesticides had significantly lower sperm concentrations. The study, published Wednesday in Environmental Health Perspectives, included data from more than 1,700 men and spanned several decades.
“No matter how we looked at the analysis and results, we saw a persistent association between increasing levels of insecticide and decreases in sperm concentration,” said study author Melissa Perry, who is an environmental epidemiologist and the dean of the College of Public Health at George Mason University. “I would hope this study would get the attention of regulators seeking to make decisions to keep the public safe from inadvertent, unplanned impacts of insecticides.”
Most of the studies were about people applying the insecticides, not the general public. And it’s well known that insecticides are far from safe, if you aren’t wearing PPE around them you’re going to pay a price.
Even if this was ‘only’ an issue for the people that make all our food its an important issue and pesticide drift is a thing. so its also an issue for the people that live near where our food is made
Not necessarily. The level or concentration of it really matters.
Radiation is a good example of this. Standing next to a leaking nuclear reactor would be very, very bad for instance. But we also get hit with radiation everyday from naturally occuring sources. Radon is naturally in the air, and anything with carbon will have the teeniest amount of a radioactive carbon isotope too. Hell, even X rays with proper shielding still get you a dose. All of this background radiation though is benign. Everyday normal exposure isn’t harmful.
The question is how much we need to be exposed to for it to be harmful, and that’s the unanswered question about pesticides. Going back to radiation, being an X Ray technician is actually enough exposure to cause harm if you’re always in the room when it goes off. We didn’t realize this until they started showing notably higher rates of cancer. There’s also some mercury compounds that are so toxic, a researcher followed all the proper procedures and still died from exposure because it turned out the little amount that got through all the protection was still a fatal dose. We literally had no idea.
So are pesticides causing a sperm reduction? We have absolutely no idea. That doesn’t mean we can’t cut back on it anyway though.
Can’t wait to hear Alex Jones lie about this one, I hope aliens get involved again
Nah the chemicals in the crops are making the sperm gay, fellow policy wonk.
Wait, you’re telling me that poisons are poison?!?
Oh my God, someone tell the pesticide companies!
Lmao I can’t remember his name to find the video, but if anybody knows it, there was this guy who said it’d be safe to drink a glass of Round-Up (or something similar?) and the interviewer deadpan asked him to do it, and the guy was like “no… I’m not stupid”
Sorry for the terrible paraphrasing, it’s a really funny (/sad) video tho
I mean, TBF if someone walked up to me with an unsealed liquid and combatively asked me to drink it I would refuse too.
It looks like the experiment itself was comparing sperm levels between direct exposure and indirect exposure. That tells us that high concentration and direct exposure reduce sperm and establishes the pesticide as capable of doing that. But it doesn’t tell us much about the global decline. Nothing in the article actually links the two together, and they haven’t even linked the actual study.
We know that some harmful substances are benign in small quantities. The everyday radiation we’re exposed to by naturally occuring isotopes doesn’t do anything. On the other hand, X Rays are safe, but the technicians actually have a noticeable increase in cancer risk if they don’t leave the room when they actually take the X Ray. So the latent background radiation there is enough to make a difference.
Ultimately, we still don’t know if the latent exposure we get to these pesticides is enough to cause reproductive harm. If there isn’t a scientifically significant difference in sperm levels between vegans and non vegetarians, I’m inclined to think this isn’t the culprit. But it’s worth further research and cutting back on usage anyway of course. It could be that we’re exposed to enough to cause a decrease in sperm, but not enough that dietary differences would be visible.
(This is why foods and consumer products can have incredibly complex molecules and still be safe. The concentration makes it benign – most of the time. This is why food additives are an interesting topic.)
Get outta here with your nuanced, well-reasoned opinions!
/s
Just kidding. Great comment and analysis, this is why I love Lemmy.
I was told that we haven’t even established that there is a global decline in sperm numbers. That the methods of counting in the past weren’t as good as modern ones, meaning it isn’t a controlled variable of one time.
Also, a long the lines of what you said, I wonder if the number of people with direct exposure has gone up the past few decades or down. Less of the human race is involved with farming as farms have grown in size and output.
That the methods of counting in the past weren’t as good as modern ones, meaning it isn’t a controlled variable of one time.
That’s actually mentioned an article.
This is fantastic news, all the better for the planet 👍
Not really, a regular sized corporation pollutes / destroys more than a dozen million of humans
Glyphosate is stored in the balls
Next stop: children of men
Im a little offended that Monsanto thinks my sperm are insects if I’m being honest
deleted by creator
It’s purely anecdotal, but go to a small town in Iowa and you may notice something a little unexpected - there’s seemingly a larger than normal population of gay and transgender people.
Again, anecdotal, but I visit there frequently for work. My gut tells me the crop treatments are screwing with hormones…unless there’s some other explanation.
“I visit there frequently…for work…” 😏
Proooobbbbably that those folks finally feel remotely safe being “out”
Sure thing, Alex.
I grew up in Iowa, and I live in a large Ohio city now. There are barely any LGBT folks in Iowa, even per capita, it’s just not normal or accepted there en mass. There was literally only one gay kid in my high school of 1500.
I move to Cleveland, then I meet more LGBT people than I have ever seen in my life, even having 4 lesbians in my workplace and one FTM.
But social media is probably the biggest driving factor behind the rise of so many LGBT people in the past decade.
You mean there was only 1 kid who was “out”
Observation bias I imagine that and the more open society. There were always LGBT people, they just were in the closet when the theist were determined to murder them.
It’s well known the elite has depopulation plans running already in the alimentary fields.
