Plastic pollution has an impact on the size of penises and the growing infertility of couples.
- Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist and professor at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, says newborn penises are getting smaller because of plastic pollution.
- Plastic pollution disrupts hormones.
Newborn penises are getting smaller and smaller due to plastic pollution, decreasing male fertility. This is the thesis of Shanna Swan, epidemiologist and professor at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, who has just published the book Count Down.
Bisphenol A and phthalates
“Hormone-altering chemicals, which include phthalates and bisphenol A, have become ubiquitous in modern life…And they began to be produced in increasing numbers after 1950, when sperm count and fertility took a turn for the worse. started to decline, writes the scientist on Twitter.
“Overall reproductive problems in men are increasing by about 1% per year in Western countries…why does this not outrage anyone?”, she wonders. If exposure to these chemicals continues in the same proportions, more than half of men will no longer be able to produce viable sperm in 2045, again according to the epidemiologist.
One in four couples are infertile
In France, one in four couples fails to achieve pregnancy after 12 months of trying. The quality of French sperm has been declining for years. “According to our study conducted among donors between 1973 and 2000, the number of spermatozoa per milliliter has increased from 80 to 40 million in thirty years. This means that in the general population, this figure is surely lower because donors , them, until 2015, had to be already fathers to be able to offer their sperm”, explains in Le Parisien Professor Jean-Philippe Wolf, head of the reproductive biology department at Cochin Hospital (Paris XIV).
.
