Television
Sperm wails
Martyn Harris
Whenever, in the future, I lie awake worrying about imminent social collapse I will take comfort from the knowledge that there are people out there measuring the penises of baby alligators ('Assault on the Male', Horizon, BBC 2, Sunday, 9.35 p.m.). If there is the time and money and interest available to do something like that, then surely alienation, fragmentation and apoca- lypse are not upon us yet.
The alligators in question live in a swami) near Orlando in Florida, which is also the home of Disneyworld. Biologists hurtled around the swamp in spiffy airboats, grab- bing alligators and squeezing their tummies so their penises popped out. Three- quarters of the nasty little beasts had underdeveloped genitals and so were unable to mate. You or I might take this for very good news, but it worried the biol- ogists, who could not identify a cause, though the high toxicity of the psychic exhalations from Disney would be good enough for most people. Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, another sci- entist called Niels Skaldcebaek was fretting over the fact that the semen of otherwise normal men contained up to 50 per cent abnormal spermatozoa. Some had no heads, some had no tails, some had neither heads nor tails, which doesn't leave much of a sperm at all. Skakkebaek went down some spiral stairs to inspect the university archive, while we hummed 'Up the Skakke- baek, down the Kattegat'. He found 60 case studies, going back 50 years and cover- ing some 15,000 sturdy Danes, which showed a 50 per cent drop in sperm count over that time, and a similar drop in vol- ume.
I would interpret these findings either to indicate that Danish microscopes had improved by 50 per cent in the last half- century or as an illustration of Murphy's Twelfth Law, which states that any phe- nomenon subjected to intense scientific study will immediately show a 50 per cent increase in the most alarming possible direction. Niels, however was not so blase, and began to put together the sperm counts with other findings of increased sex- ual disorders in men. Testicular cancer has trebled in the USA and UK over 20 years; undescended testicles are three times more common in the same period; prostate can- cer has doubled in the last decade, and hermaphroditism — the development of
female characteristics in the male repro- ductive tract — has also shown a marked increase.
British medical scientist Dr Richard Sharp decided the damage must be occur- ring in the developmental stage of the human embryo and the most likely culprit was excess oestrogen, but where did it come from? To the relief of the doctors, testing ruled out cows' milk and mothers' diet — where positive results would clearly have led to widespread panic — but the eventual findings, or rather indications, are even more appalling. The most likely cul- prits are synthetic chemical compounds which mimic the effect of oestrogen — so- called oestrogenics — which are extremely common, being found in fertilisers, insecti- cides, plastics, oils and paints. One cancer researcher even found that cancerous cells were multiplying in her laboratory because • of oestrogenic leaching from the plastic of her test tubes.
We are living, as the programme observed, 'in a sea of oestrogen': the stuff is literally in the tapwater — and it was here that scepticism and irritation once more reasserted themselves. If oestrogenics are so catastrophic and so widespread there isn't much point worrying about them because there is no way of getting rid of them without dismantling the entire struc- ture of industrial society. And anyway, haven't we been here before with DDT and PCBs and all the acronyms which substitute for original sin in this post-lapsarian world? God knows, it might all be true, and we really are drowning our fertility in oestro- genics, but life is simply too short to spend it worrying over yet another factor to make it shorter still. You might as well be dead.
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