The scale of the reproductive crisis facing humanity is staggering. Truly.
Let’s just look at men’s reproductive health, which—to be just a touch coarse—means their balls and what they do or don’t produce.
A couple of years ago, Professor Shanna Swan, a world-leading expert on reproductive health at Mt. Sinai, New York, published a book in which she predicted mankind could find it impossible to reproduce by natural means within less than a quarter of a century.
On the basis of trends in sperm counts alone, simply by extrapolating current data, Professor Swan was able to show that by 2045, the median man will have a sperm count of zero. What that means is that one half of all men will produce no sperm, and the other half will produce so few, it doesn’t really matter, because they’ll never get a woman pregnant, no matter how hard they try.
This scenario is often dubbed “spermageddon” in the popular media. It’s an amusing, catchy name—perhaps a tad too light-hearted—but if it helps get the issue stuck in people’s heads, that’s good enough for me. Mission accomplished.
Or not really, since that still leaves the huge task of actually doing something to arrest and then reverse the problem. And in fact the problem seems to be getting worse, not better.
In research published since the book—which is called Count Down, by the way, and is well worth reading—Professor Swan has shown that the trends she used to make her prediction of imminent doom just a few years ago are now accelerating. Since the turn of the millennium, declines in sperm counts in the Western world have sped up and, what’s more, the trends that have been well documented among Western men since the middle of the last century are also being mirrored among men outside the West, in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Spermageddon is now even closer than 2045, and there’s no escape from it anywhere on the planet.
So what’s causing this, I hear you ask?
As with any complex problem, there are a variety of different causes. Professor Swan identifies factors like sedentary lifestyles, obesity and bad diet, and smoking as important contributors. But she also draws our attention to the insidious effects of toxic chemicals, and especially a class of chemical called endocrine-disruptors, which are in everything from the food we eat and the water we drink to the deodorant we spray under our arms and sunscreen and soap and even toilet paper. Endocrine-disruptors are chemicals that affect the body’s hormonal (endocrine) system, with a wide range of negative consequences. Research is revealing that endocrine-disruptors are implicated in pretty much every single one of the prevailing diseases of the modern age, everything from heart disease and cancer to Alzheimer’s and autism.
A great many endocrine-disruptors are estrogenic, meaning they mimic the “female” hormone estrogen in the human body, upsetting the crucial balance of sex hormones that determines how we develop sexually. A male fetus exposed to estrogenic chemicals in the womb may end up with undescended testicles, a micropenis and low testosterone, all of which could seriously hinder or flat out prevent his chances of reproducing as an adult.
Thankfully, the fertility crisis has now been made a key focus of Robert F. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, as one of the principal chronic-health threats to the future of the United States, which is most certainly is. (It’s worth remembering, too, that the collapse in birth rates in the US, like the rest of the Western world, remains one of the principal “arguments” in favor of mass immigration. For whatever reasons—whether economic, moral or biological—we simply don’t want to have as many children as our parents and grandparents, so if we still want those very important lines on those very important graphs to keep on climbing, we need to maintain a constant inflow of people from abroad. Or so we’re told, anyway. Patriots will fail to win back their nations unless they can find a way to get their fellow countrymen and -women reproducing at higher than replacement levels—or they must outline a persuasive alternative to the ideology of infinite growth. Personally, I suspect the problem is so deep, and actually has an underlying spiritual aspect, which means the best solution is making our societies comfortable with the idea of no growth or even de-growth, at least in the short-to-medium term.)
Despite the growing focus on the chronic-disease epidemic, and a new willingness to try and tackle it there are still many, many things we don’t know about it and about the fertility crisis in particular.
I was reminded of this a few days ago when I read a new study about the potentially devastating effects on fertility of a common parasite. Scientists discovered that Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite a significant proportion of the human population has acquired, mainly from pet cats, has the ability to decapitate sperm when exposed to them.
Literally: the parasite can chop the heads off sperm when it meets them. And a headless sperm, as you might imagine, is of use to neither man nor beast.
In the past I’ve actually written about Toxoplasma gondii in a kind of positive but also jokey way, because it’s well known the parasite increases men’s testosterone levels, and if you follow my work you’ll know I’m all about increasing men’s testosterone levels. Scientific research shows that not only does the parasite increase men’s testosterone levels, but women can reliably tell, without really knowing, which men are infected simply by looking at their facial features. Men with more classically masculine features—think rugged jaw, prominent brow, even better facial symmetry—tend to be more likely to have the parasite in their bodies.
In my pursuit of optimal male hormonal health, I’ve actually suggested “catmaxxing”—buying a cat and lavishing affection on it to ensure it passes on the parasite to you—and this now appears to have become a meme among gymbros on TikTok. Hopefully not a serious one.
Toxoplasma gondii probably increases testosterone levels because doing so serves its own reproductive purposes. The parasite normally infects rodents and other small mammals, and by increasing their testosterone it makes them indulge in more risky behaviour, which then makes them more likely to be eaten by a cat, allowing the parasite to be transferred to a new host and the lifecycle to continue. Humans infected with toxoplasma gondii also engage in more risky behaviour, as a wealth of studies show.
All joking aside, the parasite’s effects on male reproductive health, as illustrated by this new study, really aren’t funny. The parasite is endemic in the human population, and in some parts of the world, including parts of Europe, infection can run as high as two-thirds of the adult population or more.
We have every reason to believe infection with Toxoplasma gondii could be contributing in a meaningful way to the collapse in male fertility, in America and elsewhere. Human studies have focused on the parasite’s effects on the brain in particular, but we’ve known since the AIDS crisis in the 1980s that it can also find its way directly into the testes, where presumably it would start chopping off heads left, right and center. More recent research since the 1980s has established links between infection and reproductive problems, including sterility, in men. A 2021 study of 163 men infected with Toxoplasma found that over 86% had semen anomalies. A 2002 study in China found that infertile couples are significantly more likely to have a Toxoplasma infection than fertile couples. A 2005 study in China also found that sterile men are more likely to test positive for Toxoplasma than fertile men.
What’s needed now is more research. RFK Jr. has made it clear the FDA and all the other agencies under his authority as head of Health and Human Services will be conducting new research into things like the efficacy and safety of vaccines and common food additives and chemicals. But what we also need is research into new emerging threats to human health or underappreciated or even unknown ones. The evidence of this new Toxoplasma study certainly seems to justify urgent attention.