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November-December 2002
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Death by numbers

Death by numbers


How poor health statistics lead to mismatched budgets, create inequities and skew health priorities. More...

 

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DECLINING SPERM COUNT

In my last column, I talked about attempts by the firecracker industry to dilute or destroy noise regulations on crackers. The more one thinks about this, one realises that this is not unusual. In fact, it could be argued that this is only to be expected. The manufacturers of firecrackers have an interest in pollution and noise. They are in the business of making a product, which if unregulated for emissions or toxicity, will be more profitable for them. In other words, they are in the business of making money through a dirty and polluted environment.
Nothing new in this. Or very dramatic. But it is important, when you consider, the number of such interest groups that operate, indeed flourish in our country. And, more importantly, when you consider how weak opposition to them is. These groups have a direct interest in ensuring that public health related regulations are weakened – from tobacco industry to the car industry. What we need is equally strong – countervailing – pressures from the protectors of public health concerns. It is this asymmetry that leads to the problems we see before us.
Take the issue of pesticides. We have had a close encounter with this equally noxious but definitely more powerful industry grouping. It is roughly two years to this date, a medical doctor living in Padre village in Kerala wrote to us about the unusually high incidences of deformity cases and increasing numbers of cancer deaths in his village. My colleagues collected samples and our laboratory tested and found exceptionally high residues of organochlorine pesticide – endosulfan – in human blood, water and food.
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URGE OVERKILL

URGE OVERKILL

The average man will be infertile within a century
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Endocrine disruptors cause an effect using more than one mechanism to disrupt normal sperm development and reproduction
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Increasing evidence shows plastics, fumes, pesticides and metals in food and water cause impaired semen quality
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The process of human conception is almost absurdly inefficient and depends completely on chance. During copulation, a man expels tens of millions of sperm, with considerable force, into his partner’s vaginal canal. Despite
the head start, most of the tiny, tadpole-shaped, self-driven cells never come close to a woman’s egg. They float deep inside a convoluted fallopian tube and hope that a chance encounter with the egg — a one in billion chance — would occur.

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And if one sperm does finally complete the journey, it may or may not have the energy left for fertilisation. With these desperate odds, a man clearly needs every last sperm he’s got to ensure conception. Any fewer than 20 million or so per millilitre (ml) of semen — 40 million to 120 million in a typical ejaculation — and his chances of siring a child begin to plummet. This is why clinicians the world-over are so concerned about a trend they are noticing over the past few years.                       more.gif


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DDT

CHILDREN AT RISK

ASTHMA

POVERTY, HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT


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