Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals: Intersex is Rising, Sperm Counts Are Falling

 Endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are those that are sufficiently similar to human hormones that they can fool the body’s hormone receptors into responding at an inappropriate time or trigger a response altogether inappropriate.  Encountering such chemicals is particularly risky if the occurrence is in the fetal stage where growth and development depend on hormonal surges at the correct time and with the correct intensity.  Body function depends critically on proper hormonal function, making encounters with these disrupting chemicals dangerous.   Consider this list provided by Wikipedia of health issues they can cause. 

“…[EDCs]are chemicals that can interfere with endocrine (or hormonal) systems. These disruptions can cause numerous adverse human health outcomes including, alterations in sperm quality and fertility, abnormalities in sex organs, endometriosis, early puberty, altered nervous system function, immune function, certain cancers, respiratory problems, metabolic issues, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular problems, growth, neurological and learning disabilities, and more.”

One might hope that such chemicals, essentially being poisons, would be highly regulated and be restricted from use in common products.  Rather, the opposite is true.  Consider this range of products using EDCs provided by this source: ENDOCRINE DISRUPTERS: A REVIEW OF SOMESOURCES, EFFECTS, AND MECHANISMS OF ACTIONS ON BEHAVIOR AND NEUROENDOCRINESYSTEMS.

“Exposure in people is typically due to contamination of the food chain, inhalation of contaminated house dust, or occupational exposure. EDCs include pesticides and herbicides (such as diphenyl-dichloro-trichloroethane, DDT, or its metabolites), methoxychlor, biocides, heat stabilizers and chemical catalysts (such as tributyltin, TBT), plastic contaminants (e.g. bisphenol A, BPA), pharmaceuticals (i.e. diethylstilbestrol, DES; 17alpha-ethynilestradiol, EE2), or dietary components (such as phytoestrogens).”

The sources of EDCs of most interest here are pharmaceuticals and plastics.  Most of the pharmaceutical drugs we ingest end up exiting our bodies through our urine, thus entering our wastewater and passing into our water systems where they accumulate over time.  The concentrations in our lakes and rivers are great enough that they are being encountered in the bodies of ocean-dwelling fish. 

The plastics industry uses thousands of chemicals in producing its products, some of which are known to be endocrine disrupters.  Plastics break down readily by fragmentation.  Every time a fragment is formed chemicals are released with the fragments.  Drinking water from a plastic bottle introduces us to a hundred or more chemicals as well as plastic particulates.  Particularly insidious is the use of plastic bottles to feed our infants formula and giving them plastic nipples with which to ingest it.  Plastic is everywhere.  Plastic particulates are in the air we breathe, on the highest mountain tops, and in the deepest ocean depths.  There are so many particulates in our waters that a breeze over the surface brings plastic particulates for us to inhale.  If the particulates are small enough, they can pass through our lungs and into our blood stream.  Similarly, small particulates can enter our blood streams through our digestive systems.  Once in our blood, particles and the chemicals they leach can go anywhere in our bodies, including through the placenta of a pregnant woman into a fetus. 

The list provided above of adverse health outcomes from encounters with EDCs is headed by “alterations in sperm quality and fertility, abnormalities in sex organs.”  These are what we are concerned with here.  Intersex is not a well-recognized issue—yet.  Wikipedia provides this definition of the term.

“Intersex people are individuals born with any of several sex characteristics including chromosome patterns, gonads, or genitals that, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, ‘do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies’.” 

It has long been known that polluted waters were causing high incidences of intersex in fish populations.  Consider this article: Intersex Fish on the Rise in Northeastern U.S. Rivers.

“The USGS defines intersex conditions in fish as occurring ‘when exposure to chemicals disrupts the hormonal systems of an animal, leading to the presence of both male and female characteristics in an animal that should exhibit the characteristics of just one sex in its lifetime’.”

The effects can be extreme as the chemical pollution increases.

“…one of the latest trends spotted in the continental Midwest and some parts of New England, male smallmouth and largemouth bass developing eggs in their testes.”

"At one study site near Hershey, Pa., USGS researchers found 100 percent of male smallmouth collected had eggs.”

In at least one site, an entire population of fish had its sexual development corrupted.  How great a level of chemical pollution would cause similar results in humans? The NIH was sufficiently concerned that intersex in humans was increasing to issue this report: The Increasing Prevalence in Intersex Variation from Toxicological Dysregulation in Fetal Reproductive Tissue Differentiation and Development by Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals.

“With the increasing incidence of intersex birth variations, urgency exists to better understand how chemicals in the environment are affecting fetal development. Identifying specific chemicals that pose the greatest risk during this critical window in genital development and quantifying the level at which they are capable of asserting their influence is an ongoing challenge for scientists.”

Male sperm counts have been falling for years.  This is not new information; what is new is the fact that sperm concentrations are becoming dangerously low.  Consider this article: How pollution is causing a male fertility crisis.  The author refers to Hagai Levine as an expert in this field.

“Seemingly small changes can have a powerful effect on these highly specialised cells, and especially, their ability to fertilise an egg. The crucial aspects for fertility are their ability to move efficiently (motility), their shape and size (morphology), and how many there are in a given quantity of semen (known as sperm count). They are the aspects that are examined when a man goes for a fertility check.”

“Sperm count, explains Levine, is closely linked to fertility chances. While a higher sperm count does not necessarily mean a higher probability of conception, below the 40 million/ml threshold the probability of conception drops off rapidly.”

We are approaching that threshold—rapidly!

“In 2022, Levine and his collaborators published a review of global trends in sperm count. It showed that sperm counts fell on average by 1.2% per year between 1973 to 2018, from 104 to 49 million/ml. From the year 2000, this rate of decline accelerated to more than 2.6% per year.”

The author also presents the work of Rebecca Blanchard, a veterinary teaching associate and researcher at the University of Nottingham, UK.  She noted that dogs share the environments of humans, encountering similar chemical environments from air, food, medications, and household plastics.

“Her research concentrated on chemicals found in plastics, fire retardants and common household items…  Her studies have revealed that these chemicals can disrupt our hormonal systems, and harm the fertility of both dogs and men.”

"’We found a reduction in sperm motility in both the human and the dog,’ says Blanchard. ‘There was also an increase in the amount of DNA fragmentation’."

“Sperm DNA fragmentation refers to damage or breaks in the genetic material of the sperm. This can have an impact beyond conception: as levels of DNA fragmentation increase, explains Blanchard, so do instances of early-term miscarriages.”

“The findings chime with other research showing the damage to fertility caused by chemicals found in plastics, household medications, in the food chain and in the air. It affects men as well as women and even babies. Black carbon, forever chemicals and phthalates have all been found to reach babies in utero.”

We are being affected by chemicals that can enter our bodies before we are born and while we live our lives.  As the concentrations of these chemicals in our environment rise ever higher, the deleterious effects become ever more prevalent.  If we wanted to ban the critical chemicals, could we do it? And could we do it before it became too late?  Current responses to such threats suggest we cannot.

 

What Is Happening to the Earth’s Temperature?

 There was a time when we could assume that we had like a century before we had to worry about global warming.  Then it became apparent that changes were happening that were measurable on a decade scale.  Now we are wondering how much worse next year will be than this year.  Recently, the famed climate scientist, James Hansen had the audacity to point out what was obvious; the experts have consistently underestimated the rate at which climate change was occurring.  Hansen is now predicting that the world will hit the optimistic target for limiting temperature rise to plus 1.5 degrees C in the 2020s and reach 2.0 degrees C by 2050.  When the Paris Accords in 2015 established the goal of limiting temperature increase to 1.5 degrees, scientists were asked to assess the possibility.  They replied in 2018.

“If the current warming rate continues, the world would reach human-induced global warming of 1.5°C around 2040.”

Hansen seems to be correct.  Berkely Earth tracks the global temperature changes and provided these comments after tallying the September 2023 data.

“Globally, September 2023 was the warmest September — and the largest monthly anomaly of any month — since records began in 1850.”

“In addition, this September exceeded the previous record by 0.50 °C (0.90 °F), an enormous margin described by one climate scientist as ‘absolutely gobsmackingly bananas’.”

“2023 is very likely (90% chance) to average more than 1.5 °C above our 1850-1900 baseline.”

Those chances may have gone up.  This UK source points out that October temperature data were even crazier.

“Globally, the average surface air temperature in October was 1.7 degrees Celsius warmer than the same month in 1850-1900, which Copernicus defines as the pre-industrial period.”

Perhaps even Hansen was too optimistic.  The Earth is a complex system and next year might find the temperature dipping a bit lower.  But we have sampled plus 1.5 degrees C and it was not pleasant.  And we will also reach 2.0 degrees C and higher, we just don’t know how soon.  Buckle up, it could be quite a ride.

 

The Effect of Native Americans on European Thought: The Indigenous Critique

There was a period in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe when scientific knowledge began to emerge, along with questions about the nature of humans and their societies that initiated a challenge to the orthodoxy demanding submission to church and monarchial state powers.  This intellectual and philosophical era is referred to as The Age of Enlightenment.  It was also the age in which colonialists learned about the American continents and the natives who had been living there.  The American natives would provide the European intellectuals with plenty to think about as they provided an alternative path to forming effective and efficient societies that focused on protecting individual liberties, a concept at odds with many centuries of European history.  The Americans would provide not only examples, but also criticism of how the Europeans mismanaged their societies.  David Graeber and David Wengrow refer this body of dispute as the “indigenous critique” in their massive book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. 

One of the questions the authors continually ask as they review human history is “how did human societies end up with hierarchical structures requiring religions, police forces, and prisons to limit personal liberties so that society could function.”  They summon new archeological and anthropological data that are emerging to show that there is plenty of evidence that early societies were more complex than once thought and they often seemed to have had structures that did not require a domineering hierarchy.  The native Americans encountered by the French and English colonists would introduce Europeans to such societies. 

What the Europeans discovered were societies that had no prisons and no laws except those that the individual people decided to obey.  Leaders were those who were most capable of convincing others that they had the best proposals.  Their terms in office terminated when that status ceased to exist.  Punishment for an action that harmed another was imposed not on the offender, but on his extended family.  That family and that of the persons abused would negotiate compensation sufficient to eliminate any desire for revenge.  The Jesuits had to admit that this peculiar system worked rather well in keeping the peace.  Males and females had specific responsibilities within a society, and each had control over their tasks.  Women also had control over their bodies.  Unmarried women had sexual liberty; married women could easily gain a divorce.  The natives did not use money.   They were not strictly an egalitarian society; wealth could accumulate to the most industrious, but it could not be used to purchase power over another; rather, it was used to acquire praise for the generosity shown in sharing it with others.  People in need were to be assisted.

Much of the documentation of these encounters comes from reports of Jesuit missionaries sent over to Christianize the natives.  Consider this description from a missionary in 1642.

“They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to anyone whomsoever, except when they like.  They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs.  All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.”

Converting such people to Catholicism would not go well.

“…scandalized missionaries frequently reported that American women were considered to have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried women had sexual liberty and married women could divorce at will.  This, for the Jesuits, was an outrage.  Such sinful conduct, they believed, was just the extension of a more general principle of freedom, rooted in natural dispositions, which they saw as inherently pernicious.  ‘The wicked liberty of the savages’, one insisted, was the single greatest impediment to their ‘submitting to the yoke of the law of God’.  Even finding terms to translate concepts like ‘lord’, ‘commandment’ or ‘obedience’ into indigenous languages was extremely difficult; explaining the underlying theological concepts, well-nigh impossible.”

The authors report on the findings of Brother Gabriel Sagard.

“Sagard was surprised and impressed by his hosts’ eloquence and powers of reasoned argument, skills honed by near-daily public discussions of communal affairs; his hosts, in contrast, when they did get to see a group of Frenchmen gathered together, often remarked on the way they seemed to be constantly scrambling over each other and cutting each other off in conversation, employing weak arguments, and overall (or so the subtext seemed to be) not showing themselves to be particularly bright.”

Consider the comments of Father Lallemant on his dealings with the Wendat (Hurons) from 1644.

“I do not believe there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjugation of their wills to any power whatever—so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except insofar as each is pleased to submit to them.  There is no punishment that is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger…”

“After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good Father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective.  Actually, it worked surprisingly well.  Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation.  This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control.  ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’  If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance they might take’.”

The American natives had no interest nor any tolerance for the type of lives lived by the French, and they had the eloquence to make the case that their way of life was superior.  The authors illustrate the indigenous critique with this insight.

“…the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly.  That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest.”

This kind of input would be of great interest anywhere people would gather to discuss human existence.

“In the years between 1703 and 1751…the indigenous American critique of European society had an enormous impact on European thought.  What began as widespread expressions of outrage and distaste by Americans (when first exposed to European mores) eventually evolved, through a thousand conversations, conducted in dozens of languages from Portuguese to Russian, into an argument about the nature of authority, decency, social responsibility and, above all, freedom.  As it became clear to French observers that most indigenous Americans saw individual autonomy and freedom of action as consummate values—organizing their own lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of one human being becoming subordinated to the will of another, and hence viewing French society as essentially one of fractious slaves—they reacted in a variety of ways.”

“Some like the Jesuits, condemned the principle of freedom outright…In fact, the indigenous critique of European institutions was seen as so powerful that anyone objecting to existing intellectual and social arrangements would tend to deploy it as a weapon of choice: a game, as we’ve seen, played by pretty much every one of the great Enlightenment philosophers.”

Philosophers get to talk as much as they want but rarely get to take any action.  The church and the state did not like their power being questioned.  An effective counter argument would be provided by an economist named A. R. J. Turgot.

“Yes, Turgot acknowledged, ‘we all love the idea of freedom and equality’—in principle.  But we must consider a larger context.  In reality, he ventured, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority; it’s a sign of inferiority, since it is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient and therefore, where everyone is equally poor.  As societies evolve, Turgot reasoned, technology advances.  Natural differences in talents and capacities between individuals (which have always existed) become more significant, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labour.  We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex ‘commercial civilization’, in which the poverty and dispossession of some—however lamentable it may be—is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of the society as a whole.”

Turgot would go on to propose a theory of human social evolution in which humans progress from a stage of hunter-gatherer to a pastoral community followed by an agricultural phase before finally emerging into this “commercial’ stage.  This logic pleased the powerful because they could view their power and wealth as being a result of a meritocratic process that rewarded their obvious superior talents.  It also cast shade on those who were on a different path, relegating them to dwellers in an earlier stage of social evolution.

“Everyone was to be sorted along the same grand evolutionary ladder, depending on their primary mode of acquiring food.  ‘Egalitarian’ societies were banished to the bottom of this ladder, where at best they could provide some insight on how our distant ancestors might have lived; but certainly could no longer be imagined as equal partners to a dialogue about how the inhabitants of wealthy and powerful societies should conduct themselves in the present.”

This attitude would serve the European nations well as they rushed to colonize , dominate, and extract wealth from as much of the world as possible

Perhaps Turgot should have included an even larger context and considered where his beloved technical advances might take us.  The Wendat told the French that they possessed more things than them, but they exceeded the French in “ease, comfort and time.”  Can we really claim that our society has provided us with increasing ease, comfort, and time—or are those things intended to disappear?  The authors relish reminding us that for most, we submit ourselves to indentured servitude, if not outright slavery, at least eight hours per day and for at least five days a week—yet we claim to be living in the land of the free.  We claim to live in a democracy, but our only influence on society comes when about half of us have the energy or knowledge to cast a vote.  And on those occasions, only about half of that half have taken the time to try and understand what they are voting for.  For many, the motivation is merely “What’s in it for me.”  Would the indigenous critique change any if the Wendat encountered our twenty-first century society?