Spermaggedon in the West? Relax, Harvard has good news for you - Haaretz

The 60 percent decline in sperm count from the 1970s, reported in 2017 by Hagai Levine, is based on studies with problematic assumptions and could be based on normal variability, critique suggests?

A new paper by researchers from Harvard University, MIT and other top-notch institutions provides an alternative interpretation of the facts cited in a 2017 meta-study, which warned of a drastic 60 percent drop in sperm count in the West during the last 50 years.

Sperm count – sperm concentration multiplied by the volume of the sample – had dropped by 59.3 percent from 1973 to date, they found.

And where the original authors see a steep decline in sperm counts in the “West” (consisting of North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand), Harvard sees natural variability.

Speaking with Haaretz, Hagai Levine takes the opportunity to correct a popular misconception about the 2017 paper and its grouping of West (sperm in decline) and non-West (sperm ostensibly not in decline), which inspired not a few racists to frantically bang their gongs.

It’s true that the distinction of West and non-West is artificial, but it’s because there have been a lot of studies on sperm counts/concentrations in the “West” but not a lot of studies elsewhere, he explains.

A key argument in the reinterpretation by Boulicault et al is that the studies on which Levine’s paper is based all follow some basic assumptions, implicit and explicit, about how to measure and interpret sperm counts.

Specific studies on sperm count should therefore factor in the relationship between individual and population sperm counts, and historical and ecological factors.

In the stead of the Sperm Count Decline hypothesis, they offer the Sperm Count Biovariability hypothesis.

Also, who says a lower sperm count compared with the ’70s spells greater infertility and poorer overall male health, as Levine and the Israeli-international team contended.

Sperm count above a critical threshold “is not necessarily an indicator of better health or higher probability of fertility relative to less,” the Harvard team writes.

But the Harvard team doesn’t accept the link between the hormone disruptors in pollution and sperm count as a given cause of the supposed disappearance of Western sperm.

“Sperm count varies across bodies, ecologies, and time periods,” they write, urging that sperm count studies factor in “life-historical” as well as ecological elements.