Category Archives: Environment
Is it true that humans could become extinct if sperm counts in men continue to fall?
It seems that there are sound reasons to believe this may be the case
I believe that you will find the following words in my blog ones to be concerned about. I have elected to combine three media articles into this blog presentation as I believe that they are mutually complementary to each other. There is also overlaps of information between the three of them. The first item is a news story derived from the BBC, the second story is derived from the American Thinker news journal and the third is from ABC Australia’s triple J radio station.
It is these articles that I feel you will find to be most confrontational and disturbing. Amongst other things they talks about extensively about water pollution that emanates from the effects of estrogenic compounds in water supplies, from industry, agriculture and artificial birth control chemicals flowing into the public water supply system. The article focuses heavily on the dangers of birth control chemicals.
I have emboldened text that I feel may most interest you. I acknowledge that this important information has been derived from secondary sources and furthermore there may be a covert political agenda in the American Thinker article. I will leave it to you to make up your own mind about this matter.
Article 1: [From the BBC]
Sperm count drop ‘could make humans extinct’
By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News
25 July 2017
Humans could become extinct if sperm counts in men continue to fall at current rates, a doctor has warned.
Researchers assessing the results of nearly 200 studies say sperm counts among men from North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, seem to have halved in less than 40 years.
Some experts are sceptical of the Human Reproduction Update findings.
But lead researcher Dr Hagai Levine said he was “very worried” about what might happen in the future.
The assessment, one of the largest ever undertaken, brings together the results of 185 studies between 1973 and 2011.
Dr Levine, an epidemiologist, told the BBC that if the trend continued humans would become extinct.
Decline rate ‘increasing’
“If we will not change the ways that we are living and the environment and the chemicals that we are exposed to, I am very worried about what will happen in the future,” he said.
“Eventually we may have a problem, and with reproduction in general, and it may be the extinction of the human species.”
Scientists not involved in the study have praised the quality of the research but say that it may be premature to come to such a conclusion.
Dr Levine, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, found a 52.4% decline in sperm concentration, and a 59.3% decline in total sperm count in men from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
The study also indicates the rate of decline among men living in these countries is continuing and possibly even increasing.
In contrast, no significant decline was seen in South America, Asia and Africa, but the researchers point out that far fewer studies have been conducted on these continents. However, Dr Levine is concerned that eventually sperm counts could fall in these places too.
Many previous studies have indicated similar sharp declines in sperm count in developed economies, but skeptics say that a large proportion of them have been flawed.
Some have investigated a relatively small number of men, or included only men who attend fertility clinics and are, in any case, more likely to have low sperm counts.
There is also concern that studies that claim to show a decline in sperm counts are more likely to get published in scientific journals than those that do not.
Another difficulty is that early methods of counting sperm may have overestimated the true count.
Taken together these factors may have created a false view of falling sperm counts.
But the researchers claim to have accounted for some of these deficiencies, leaving some doubters, such as Prof Allan Pacey of Sheffield University, less skeptical.
He said: “I’ve never been particularly convinced by the many studies published so far claiming that human sperm counts have declined in the recent past.”
“However, the study today by Dr Levine and his colleagues deals head-on with many of the deficiencies of previous studies.”
But Prof Pacey believes that although the new study has reduced the possibility of errors it does not entirely remove them. So, he says, the results should be treated with caution.
“The debate has not yet been resolved and there is clearly much work still to be done.
“However, the paper does represent a step forward in the clarity of the data which might ultimately allow us to define better studies to examine this issue.”
There is no clear evidence for the reason for this apparent decrease. But it has been linked with exposure to chemicals used in pesticides and plastics, obesity, smoking, stress, diet, and even watching too much TV.
Dr Levine says that there is an urgent need to find out why sperm counts are decreasing and to find ways of reversing the trend.
“We must take action – for example, better regulation of man-made chemicals – and we must continue our efforts on tackling smoking and obesity.”
Sperm count drop ‘could make humans extinct’
Article 2: [From American Thinker]
July 27, 2017
Low sperm counts? Report fails to mention birth control in water supplies
By Monica Showalter
A study has found that male sperm counts have plunged since 1973, citing the evidence found in a large number of studies. Scientists say a continuation of this trend could mean the human race will go extinct.
A team of scientists is sounding the alarm about declining sperm counts among men in the Western world.
As Hagai Levine, the lead author of a recently published study, told the BBC, “If we will not change the ways that we are living and the environment and the chemicals that we are exposed to, I am very worried about what will happen in the future.”
He added, “Eventually we may have a problem, and with reproduction in general, and it may be the extinction of the human species.”
Sperm counts have fallen an average of 1.2 percent each year, and the compounded effect of that has resulted in a more than 50% drop in sperm counts today. CBS news reports that it follows a 1992 study that shows the exact same 50% decline, so nothing has changed in the rate of decline; it remains steady.
Sperm concentration decreased an average 52 percent between 1973 and 2011, while total sperm count declined by 59 percent during that period, researchers concluded after combining data from 185 studies. The research involved nearly 43,000 men in all.
“We found that sperm counts and concentrations have declined significantly and are continuing to decline in men from Western countries,” said senior researcher Shanna Swan.
The effect of estrogenic compounds in the water supply from industry, agriculture, and other sources raises concerns about human health and deserves scrutiny.
The one factor the report doesn’t mention, but probably should, is the credible reports of artificial birth control getting into the water supply.
This is not the Catholic Church’s argument against contraception going on here – the Catholic Church opposes artificial contraception because it interferes with the natural male-female relationship in marriage and discourages its use. This is something entirely different: whether one person’s right to “control her own body” entitles her to damage the reproductive system of another person’s body. Ultimately, it is a question of whether a man has a right to control his own body, too. This is deep libertarian territory.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Iain Murray has done significant research on the effects of birth control pills in the water supply, pointing out that its hormones released into the water supply, which can’t be filtered out, are creating “intersex” characteristics and sterility in the fish supply. Fish exhibit sexual characteristics of both species due to estrogen contamination and cannot reproduce. Scientific American has noted that despite the claims that the amounts present are small, the presence of them has harmed wildlife in the water supply. Might be canaries in the coal mine for us.
Writing in 2008, Murray noted:
As I demonstrate in The Really Inconvenient Truths, by any standard typically used by environmentalists, the pill is a pollutant. It does the same thing, just worse, as other chemicals they call pollution. But liberals have gone to extraordinary lengths in order to stop consideration of contraceptive estrogen as a pollutant.
When Bill Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency launched its program to screen environmental estrogens (a program required under the Food Quality Protection Act), the committee postponed considering impacts from contraceptives. Instead, it has decided to screen and test only “pesticide chemicals, commercial chemicals, and environmental contaminants.” When and if it considers the impacts from oral contraceptives, the Agency says that its consideration will be limited because pharmaceutical regulation is a Food and Drug Administration concern.
As a result, the EPA’s program will focus all energies on the smallest-possible part of endocrine exposure in the environment and the lowest-risk area.
The U.S. Geological Survey has found problems, too.
A recent report from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found that birth-control hormones excreted by women, flushed into waterways and eventually into drinking water can also impact fish fertility up to three generations after exposure – raising questions about their effects on humans, who are consuming the drugs without even knowing it in each glass of water they drink.
The survey, published in March in the journal Scientific Reports, looked at the impact of the synthetic hormone 17α-ethinylestradiol (EE2), an ingredient of most contraceptive pills, in the water of Japanese medaka fish during the first week of their development.
While the exposed fish and their immediate offspring appeared unaffected, the second generation of fish struggled to fertilize eggs – with a 30% reduction in fertilization rates – and their embryos were less likely to survive. Even the third generation of fish had 20% impaired fertility and survival rates, though they were never directly exposed to the hormone.
The article states that there have been problems in mammals, too.
The Vatican, too, has spoken out about the environmental damage of artificial birth control going unfiltered into the water supply, specifically linking it to male infertility. Agence France-Presse reports:
The contraceptive pill is polluting the environment and is in part responsible for male infertility, a report in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said Saturday.
The contraceptive pill is polluting the environment and is in part responsible for male infertility, a report in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said Saturday.
The pill “has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature” through female urine, said Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, in the report.
“We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill,” he said, without elaborating further.
“We are faced with a clear anti-environmental effect which demands more explanation on the part of the manufacturers,” added Castellvi.
The blame cannot be laid on individuals who are attempting to do something they believe is responsible and useful and who have no intent to harm others. Nobody here is calling for the pill’s prohibition in a free society, where people of all religions should be free to make their own choices.
There should be reason, however, to look into whether birth control is affecting the water supply and contributing to this species-threatening low sperm count matter. The science does show that compounds excreted by users are impossible to filter from the water supply, and there are credible reports as to this affecting male fertility.
I would add that the span of years coincides with the rise of birth control pills, and it also coincides with the nations that use it.
A pro-contraception trade group, the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals, has admitted in a long editorial that there could be a problem, even as it tries to exculpate its industry, citing other possibilities.
The effect of estrogenic compounds in the water supply from industry, agriculture, and other sources raises concerns about human health and deserves scrutiny.
But all we see blamed in this and other editorials are “pesticide chemicals, commercial chemicals, and environmental contaminants,” as National Review’s article notes.
Seriously, why? Why not investigate everything and, if there is a problem found, find new ways to filter out the pollutants from the water supply? For all the global warmers’ alarmed claims about the threat to the species, here is a real threat, it’s moving fast, and nothing effective is being done about it.
Low sperm counts? Report fails to mention birth control in water supplies
Article 3: [ABC radio triple J]
Yes, sperm counts are way down: What does this say about men’s health?
The health of sperm in men in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand is falling dramatically. According to 2017 research, sperm counts among Western men have halved since the 1970s.
This widely reported figure has inspired apocalyptic predictions of mass infertility, like something from The Handmaid’s Tale or Children of Men.
But whether or not this comes to pass, the problem is already critical: Poor sperm health is usually an indicator of poor general health. Whatever is hurting the sperm is probably hurting other parts of us too.
Dr Hagai Levine from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, lead author of the 2017 study, said that while the research has found men in richer countries are more affected by the decline, that could be because there isn’t as much research from poorer countries.
Chemical pollution and other environmental factors could also be partly responsible, as well as lifestyle factors such as obesity and stress.
“This study is an urgent wake-up call to investigate the causes of the sharp, ongoing drop in sperm count,” Dr Levine said.
In 100 years we may be unable to conceive
Dr Nicole McPherson from the University of Adelaide, who’s leading research into sperm rates of men’s health, also said the causes were both environmental and lifestyle.
“What you eat, your high-sugar diets and lots of red meat intake, the fatter you are, smoking, alcohol intake, illicit drug use – these all negatively impact the quality of your sperm,” she said.
“It’s the environment that we live in, everything we touch.
She said that sperm rates were still high enough for us to conceive, but if they continued to fall at historical rates, we’d have a problem in 100 years.
“If the trend continues – declining at 1.4 per cent every year – in 100 years time we’re definitely going to have a major problem,” she said.
“I don’t know if it will decline continuously or there will be a leveling out of sperm count.”
Yes, sperm counts are way down: What does this say about men’s health?
Is an environmental disaster looming in the Arctic?
I think you may find this is a story to be concerned about
It seems this may be the case but not immediately. An abandoned 1950s US (nuclear powered) military camp is being progressively exposed though ice from Greenland’s receding icecap.
This camp’s tunnels had a total length of 3,000 metres (1.9 mi), and these tunnels also contained a hospital, a shop, a theater and a church.
It seems as the ice caps melt the camp, including it’s portable nuclear reactor, will become progressively exposed sometime late this century, if not sooner. The camp is relic of the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States. For more information I will quote an extract from a wider article relating to the subject cited further below.
Quote:
“…At the height of the cold war, as the US and the USSR were engaged in a terrifying standoff over the deployment of Soviet missiles in Cuba, the US army was considering the construction of a vast subterranean extension of Camp Century…” Readers may see original footage of the Camp being constructed here.
“…A system of about 4,000 kilometres of icy underground tunnels and chambers extending over an area around three times the size of Denmark were to have housed 600 ballistic missiles in clusters six kilometres apart, trained on Moscow and its satellites.
Eventually the engineers realised Iceworm would not work. The constantly moving ice was too unstable and would have deformed and perhaps even collapsed the tunnels.
From 1964 Camp Century was used only intermittently, and three years later it was abandoned altogether, the departing soldiers taking the reaction chamber of the nuclear generator with them.
They left the rest of the camp’s infrastructure – and its biological, chemical and radioactive waste – where it was, on the assumption it would be “preserved for eternity” by the perpetually accumulating snow and ice.
Thus far their assumption has proven correct. Up to 12 metres deep at the time it was abandoned, the ice covering Camp Century has since thickened to around 35 metres and will continue to deepen for a while yet.
Climate change, however, looks certain to reverse that process, Colgan and his six-strong team from Canadian, US and European universities said in their report, which was published last month in Geophysical Research Letters…”
Additional media article:
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/06/camp-century-global-warming/
Secretive and adverse chemical industry documents rediscovered in the United States
These documents include those of regulatory authorities as well.
The contents of this blog seem to confirm the off-handed approach that businesses and regulatory authorities have taken in the United States since the 1920’s.
I wonder whether we have the same sort of problem in Australia?
Quote:
“The “Poison Papers” represent a vast trove of rediscovered chemical industry and regulatory agency documents and correspondence stretching back to the 1920s. Taken as a whole, the papers show that both industry and regulators understood the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products and worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press… …the fraudulence of some of the regulatory processes relied upon to protect human health and the environment.”
‘It scares me’: Permafrost thaw in Canadian Arctic sign of global trend
This is a very important story that I feel the whole world should know about right now!
I will leave this story to talk for itself.
Quote:
“ …”It scares me,” said Kumari Karunaratne, a permafrost expert who works for the Northwest Territories Geological Survey. “This methane that’s being released is being released over huge areas across the north. And it’s continually seeping out.
Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. So, as climate change speeds up the permafrost melt, the permafrost melt will exacerbate climate change. By exactly how much, it’s impossible to say. Karunaratne won’t even try to guess, because measuring it is difficult and imprecise. The area where it’s happening is vast and much of it remains uninhabited and unexplored. But there are dramatic examples that show just how much methane is bubbling up from underground. Some lakes in the Arctic are so full of it, if you punch a hole in the ice you can light the escaping gas on fire. YouTube has videos of researchers and others doing it in Alaska and Siberia. But the same thing is happening in the Northwest Territories.
There are other problems, too.
Last summer in Siberia, the unusually intense summer heat melted the permafrost, exposing a reindeer carcass that had been embedded in it. That carcass was infected with anthrax, a deadly bacteria that had been locked in the ice. A 12-year-old boy died after being infected and at least eight others were sickened. It opens up the possibility that other dangers could be unleashed. Siberian researchers say a gravesite in one town contains bodies of people who died of smallpox in the 1890s. They were buried in the soil just above the permafrost, which is now melting. That’s raising fears that smallpox, which was eradicated globally in 1977, could make a comeback. A woman stands with reindeer in the Yamal-Nenets region of Siberia, Russia, where a 12-year-old boy died and 20 people were infected in 2016 after an anthrax outbreak. An unusually intense summer had melted the permafrost, exposing a reindeer carcass containing anthrax.
Sergey Netesov, chief of the virology laboratory at Novosibirsk State University, told the Siberian Times newspaper that there are thousands of graves in the region — some human, some cattle. The recent anthrax outbreak, he said, is “reason enough to finance research into the diagnostics and prevention of exceptionally dangerous infections.” Whether that happens or not, people in the Northwest Territories know they have no power to stop climate change. Global temperatures are already at record levels and the polar regions are feeling the effects more dramatically than anywhere else. “There are really remarkable changes that are happening in a short amount of time,” said Karunaratne.
And there’s likely more to come.”…”