Why the human race could be infertile in 50 years.
What you need to know about falling sperm counts and the male fertility crisis.
The great Western fertility furore.
Welcome to the end of the world. In case you missed it, we’re living through spermageddon.
Or at least, this is the way emerging research about falling sperm counts is often framed. Last month, the New Scientist published a piece for which the print headline was ‘Avoiding spermageddon’. But the popular-science magazine is far from alone. All of the examples I opened this post with are from real reports, not tweaked by me for dramatic effect.
‘Spermaggedon’ is a phrase that’s been employed many times, by many media outlets. The Guardian, Sky News, the Sydney Morning Herald...I could go on. Even the New York Times has labelled this sperm-count business a ‘crisis’.
What is or isn’t going on with sperm counts is undeniably interesting (and possibly scary). As the New Scientist piece explains, researchers sounded the alarm on declining sperm counts back in the 1970s. But the new, rather apocalyptic register this topic has acquired can probably be traced to a major 2017 study – a meta-analysis of 185 previous studies – which concluded that sperm counts seemed to be declining at a rate of 1.5 per cent per year on average. It was estimated there’d been a 50-60 per cent drop since 1973.
Theoretically, if this continued, the median sperm count would reach zero within 50 years.
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