For people with male factor infertility (or possibly even unexplained infertility): Canada's national broadcasting corporation has created a documentary on how environmental ills, particularly the millions of chemicals in our world, are affecting men's fertility and other aspects of health.
I believe that chemical exposure is the reason for my DH's infertility - since there is no record of such a thing among his many male relatives in his family history - and so I'm going to watch this doc tonight on CBC Newsworld.
The Disappearing Male
Thursday June 11 at 8 pm on CBC-TV & Saturday June 13, 2009 at 10 pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld
"We are conducting a vast toxicological experiment in which our children and our children's children are the experimental subjects." - Dr. Herbert Needleman
The Disappearing Male is about one of the most important, and least publicized, issues facing the human species: the toxic threat to the male reproductive system.
The last few decades have seen steady and dramatic increases in the incidence of boys and young men suffering from genital deformities, low sperm count, sperm abnormalities and testicular cancer. Some researchers say that declining male fertility rates could be the first sign of extinction.
At the same time, boys are now far more at risk of suffering from ADHD, autism, Tourette's syndrome, cerebral palsy, and dyslexia.
The Disappearing Male takes a close and disturbing look at what many doctors and researchers now suspect are responsible for many of these problems: a class of common chemicals that are ubiquitous in our world.
Found in everything from shampoo, sunglasses, meat and dairy products, carpet, cosmetics and baby bottles, they are called "hormone mimicking" or "endocrine disrupting" chemicals and they may be starting to damage the most basic building blocks of human development.
NOTE FROM OHW: You can watch this documentary for free online (it's listed in the top right-hand corner, underneath 'Doc Zone').
4 comments:
very interesting! I saw something a few years ago here in the States on environmental impacts on female fertility. I think more should be paid to the toxins that could/are going into our bodies, in this regard. Especially when no history shows infertility in the family.
That's really interesting. I've heard that estrogen and estrogen-like chemicals are causing problems for men's reproductive health - lots of soy products (soy is an estrogen mimicker, right?), and I heard somewhere that our cities' water filtration systems don't remove chemicals like estrogen, which are increasingly prevalent (the Pill has quite a bit of estrogen, right?).
Interesting. Thanks for posting this.
Will watch that! Thanks for posting...
OHW, thanks for the perspective on 'conservatism'. I do not swallow stereotypes easy. And so, I had some idea about the myriad populace in the US...for e.g. the Amish people...
You are so interesting.
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