A more significant problem than global warming?

Yikes! Maleness is being destroyed by chemicals, says a new study reported here.

How serious is the problem? Let's be honest: we don't know because we have no idea if we're to take this study as the final word. The fact is, the news media constantly reports on a host of sensational scientific studies (I suppose they don't bother reporting on the non-sensational studies) that turn out to be -- well, not entirely true. Or at least overstated.

But let's just put it this way: if the study is to be believed, it raises the spectre of a severe shortage of males in the future. The news story ends with this astonishing fact: sperm counts "have dropped from 150 million per millilitre of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years." I can't help but believe that if this assertion were widely accepted as true, it would be garnering far more panic.

Here are highlights from the news report:

". . . a host of common chemicals is feminizing males of every class of vertebrate animals, from fish to mammals, including people.

". . . . baby boys born to women exposed to widespread chemicals in pregnancy are born with smaller penises and feminized genitals.

"Many have been identified as "endocrine disrupters" - or gender-benders - because they interfere with hormones. These include phthalates, used in food wrapping, cosmetics and baby powders among other applications; flame retardants in furniture and electrical goods; PCBs, a now banned group of substances still widespread in food and the environment; and many pesticides.
. . . .
"Even more ominously for humanity, mammals have also been found to be widely affected. Two-thirds of male Sitka black-tailed deer in Alaska have been found to have undescended testes and deformed antler growth, and roughly the same proportion of white-tailed deer in Montana were discovered to have genital abnormalities.

"Most alarming for humans, new research at the University of Rochester in New York state shows that boys born to mothers with raised levels of phthalates were more likely to have smaller penises and undescended testicles. They also had a shorter distance between their anus and genitalia, a classic sign of feminization.

"Communities heavily polluted with gender-benders in Canada, Russia and Italy have given birth to twice as many girls than boys, which may offer a clue to the reason for a mysterious shift in sex ratios worldwide. Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls, but the ratio is slipping. It is calculated that 250,000 babies who would have been boys have been born as girls instead in the U.S. and Japan alone.

"And sperm counts are dropping precipitously. Studies in more than 20 countries have shown that they have dropped from 150 million per millilitre of sperm fluid to 60 million over 50 years."