The BBC has just released a video on the dramatic findings of Dr. Shanna Swan's landmark research on declining sperm counts.
She is an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist and the author of the breakthrough book Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race.
"A man today has only about half the amount of sperm that his grandfather had," the video says. And women are less fertile at 21 than their grandmothers at 35.
"We're looking at the sperm concentrations, when we last looked at them–samples collected in 2011–the sperm concentration in Western countries was 47 million per milliliter down from 99 million per milliliter 39 years earlier," says Swan in the video.
Exposure to farmland intensively sprayed with herbicide appears to be one of the biggest hazards-for workers as well as for residents.
"We looked at pesticides metabolized in their urine, and how they related to the sperm count, concentration and shape of those. We found that there was a big difference in sperm count and quality" she says.
"Most dramatic was that men who were living in central Missouri, which is an agricultural area, where there's a lot of corn and soy grown and a lot of pesticides used, they had only half as many moving sperm as men in Minneapolis. This is huge. And they were not workers, they were just residents of the area."
Glyphosate application rates for soybean and corn are much higher than in wine country, as those crops are engineered to be Roundup Ready–i.e. sprayed intensively.
Gyphosate is allowed for use under "sustainability" vineyard certifications. It is prohibited in organically grown wines.
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