04 December
Incoming House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark said her generation could bring a new perspective to Congress because her kids grew up being scared about climate change and gun violence.
- PFAS on our shelves and in our bodies
- Fractured
- Exposed: BPA science
- Agents of Change
- Cutting edge of science
- Climate catastrophe in the South
- Cancer risk in Pittsburgh
- PFAS contamination
- Breathless: Childhood asthma
- Peak Pig: The soul of rural America
- Sacred Water
- Winged Warnings
- Pollution, Poverty, People of Color
Top news in Children
Consequential reporting about children's health, written and selected by journalists and scientists at Environmental Health News.
From The Web
Featured
Subscribe
to Children's Health
What is happening with sperm counts?
This study shows, for the first time, that sperm counts are declining everywhere, not only in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, which was shown previously, but also in South America, Asia and Africa. This new analysis found that sperm count globally dropped by more than 50% between 1973 and 2018, and that the decline is accelerating: Since 1972, sperm count has dropped by about 1% each year. Since 2000, the annual decrease has been, on average, more than 2.6%.
What do lower sperm counts mean for our health?
This accelerated decrease in global sperm counts means more people will need to use assisted reproduction to get pregnant. These findings imply more than decreased fertility; lower sperm counts are linked to more disease later in life (cardiovascular disease, diabetes and reproductive cancers) and a shorter life expectancy.
Why are sperm counts declining?
The decline is too rapid to be due to genetic causes alone. Some risk factors for lower sperm counts have to do with lifestyle; smoking, obesity, stress and binge drinking. In addition, environmental chemicals — particularly those that can alter the body’s hormones called endocrine disrupting chemicals (pesticides, phthalates, BPA, PFAS chemicals and others) — have been shown to reduce sperm counts and quality and are likely contributing to this decline.
What can be done about lower sperm counts?
While scientists continue to tease out the causes, men should avoid smoking, a sedentary lifestyle, excessive weight gain, drug and alcohol abuse, and potentially toxic chemicals. This means buying organic food when possible or washing fruits and vegetables that may have pesticide residues. Another good idea is avoiding plastics in food contact materials and personal care and household products that contain phthalates and other endocrine-disrupting compounds.
Read more about the new study: A new analysis shows a “crisis” of male reproductive health
Watch Dr. Shanna Swan discuss the work and implications
After Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and I published Our Stolen Future in 1996, we got "slapped" by one of the most prominent science journalists of the day, Gina Kolata writing for the New York Times.
Among her criticisms was that one chemical can't cause a plethora of diseases. It was one chemical, one disease, like asbestos and mesothelioma.
Talk about progress. That "paradigm" is so broken now it's hard to imagine how any science editor who has been following advances in the environmental health sciences, including endocrine disruption, would allow an argument like that to pass the editorial laugh test. Yes, there are examples other than asbestos that do follow that pattern, but especially in endocrine disruption, they are the exception, not the rule.
As Thomas Kuhn wrote in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), current scientific paradigms have enormous inertia. This is still true. And that's even without the active dissembling focused on resisting change funded purposefully and heavily by vested interests, a fact of life in work on the environmental health consequences of chemical exposures.
Despite strong and wily opposition, the environmental health science community using science and communication over the past two decades has shattered multiple paradigms that for decades if not centuries medicine had held dear, preventing its practitioners from embracing the opportunities to prevent diseases by reducing exposures, instead of merely treating them (usually with pharmaceutical chemicals).
Some of my favorite broken paradigms?
- "The dose makes the poison." (We now know that high dose exposures do not predict low dose impacts.)
- "Nature vs. Nurture" becomes "Nature and Nurture."
- "Those statistically significant adverse effects are not toxicologically relevant because they aren't the same in both sexes."
Actually, for endocrine-disrupting compounds, the default expectation now is that there will be differences between how the sexes respond to exposure. And then there's the still ubiquitous practice among regulatory agencies of testing chemicals one at a time, instead of in the mixtures in which they always occur.
The Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE) community has played a pivotal role over the last two decades in breaking down these outdated paradigms. How? It has created, purposefully and steadfastly, multiple real and virtual safe spaces where new ideas and results can be examined, discussed and debated, not just by people throwing bricks at the old paradigms, but by thoughtful scientists willing to listen to new ideas, new data, new hypotheses that challenge some of their most cherished notions.
More, these spaces by design have welcomed advocates with serious commitments to carry the discussions into the real world, to share this ongoing thunder of scientific understandings with the media, policy advocates, and even provocateurs. Those safe spaces have been immeasurably valuable for progress. They might not be the flashiest new shiny objects on the block, but they have helped us get beyond old, outdated and sometimes even harmful ideas.
CHE has done all that as waves of new scientific results have been published and as the media landscape has changed enormously. The CHE community has embraced the new results and adapted to sweeping revolutions in communication challenges and opportunities.
And that's what the next two decades of environmental health science and communication needs more of, turbocharged.
Pete Myers is the founder and chief scientist of Environmental Health Sciences, publisher of EHN.org and DailyClimate.org.
This essay originally published San Francisco Marin Medicine journal.
Lower birth weights are associated with multiple health problems later in life, from diabetes to heart problems.
In the study, published earlier this month in Environmental Health, the research team also found that mothers with high-risk pregnancies who had higher glyphosate levels in their urine during the first trimester were also more likely to have babies admitted to neonatal intensive care units, or NICUs.
Related: Glyphosate, explained
Although the study looked at a limited number of pregnant people, it adds to a small but growing body of evidence linking the most commonly used weed killer in the world to potential pregnancy harms, John Meeker, a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health who was not involved with the study, told EHN.
Given the animal literature showing congenital disabilities and reproductive harms from glyphosate, the new study, Meeker added, “really further shines light on the need for more studies in this area.”
Rise in glyphosate brings health concerns
Glyphosate was originally marketed as a safer alternative to other herbicides, but as its use has grown, so too have concerns about its potential health effects. Of particular focus has been its potential to cause cancer, as highlighted by several recent high-profile lawsuits in the U.S., such as a class-action lawsuit in which up to 140,000 plaintiffs allege they developed a type of cancer called Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma due to Roundup use (glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup).
But researchers like Dr. Paul Winchester, study author and professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Indiana Medical School, are also worried about pesticide exposure in the womb.
In an earlier study looking at glyphosate levels in pregnant people, Winchester and colleagues found glyphosate present in 94% of the expecting moms. “That was a huge surprise, that you went from a chemical that didn’t exist [on the market] to one that’s found in almost every pregnant mother,” Winchester, who is also a neonatal intensive care unit doctor, told EHN.
Given glyphosate’s potential impacts on pregnancy outcomes, he and other researchers looked specifically at people in Indiana with high-risk pregnancies in the new study. When the team sampled the group’s urine during the first trimester, they found glyphosate in 186 out of 187 — or 99% — of the people involved in the study.
The team also found a correlation between the amount of glyphosate in the urine and lower birth weight. Low birth weight contributes to breathing problems in newborns, difficulty feeding and even Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. A number of studies have also shown that it can have long-term effects on health and development. “Virtually all the major chronic diseases suffered from in adulthood can be linked to being smaller at birth,” Winchester said.
Stephanie Eick, a perinatal and environmental epidemiologist at the Rollins School of Public Health who wasn’t involved in the study, told EHN that exposure to glyphosate during pregnancy appears to be widespread. However, she noted, because the people in the new study were at higher risk for pregnancy complications, the reduction in birth weights might be associated with other factors and not glyphosate exposure.
“I think it's still too soon to know whether these are really causal associations, just because there have not really been a lot of studies that have looked at the effects of glyphosate during pregnancy,” she said.
Meeker, the University of Michigan professor, said that although the study was small, its findings were statistically significant. In a study in Puerto Rico, he and colleagues found a link between glyphosate exposure during pregnancy and premature birth.
Future studies should focus on pregnant people with higher exposure rates, like farm workers, and also sample throughout pregnancy due to how quickly glyphosate leaves the body, Meeker added. He would also like to see glyphosate measured in the National Institute of Health’s ECHO study, which looks at how environmental pollutants, demographics, genetics and other factors affect prenatal and other health outcomes in a national sample of people.
“That would be a perfect opportunity to get a broader national view of the impacts of glyphosate on pregnancy and child development,” he said.
Reducing glyphosate exposure
Monsanto, an agribusiness company now owned by Bayer, first sold glyphosate as a weedkiller in 1974. Use skyrocketed in the 1990s with the introduction of genetically modified crops that didn’t die when farmers sprayed Roundup and other glyphosate-containing herbicides. At least 250 million pounds of glyphosate are applied yearly on farms and the weedkiller is also commonly used in parks, playgrounds and home gardens.
People can be exposed to glyphosate by using weed killers, drinking water (especially if they’re in a farming community) and through residue on foods. Researchers suggest washing fruits and vegetables before eating them and eating organic, which has been shown to reduce glyphosate levels in our bodies quickly.
More broadly, this and other studies point to the need for the U.S. to do more aggressive safety testing on chemicals, as is done in Europe, Eick added.
“It doesn't seem to me that chemicals are really regulated at all before they're able to enter the U.S. market,” said Eick. “And so then the onus is really on the research scientist to figure out if the chemical is bad after we're already widely exposed.”