Infertility in Spanish Pigs Has Been Traced to Plastics. A Warning for Humans?

“You miss the point of scientific principles. IF you are seeing a fertility doc you already have problems.”

Excellent point.

Why is there now a need for SIX+ times the number of fertility doctors as opposed to 20 years ago? This isn’t an area where women ‘put off childbearing’. It’s the rural south. If you make it to 25 without having ‘completed your perfect 2 child family’ they think there’s something wrong with you. And apparently lot of them DO have something wrong with them now...

Were people just as infertile but somehow it escaped their notice 20 years ago? ‘It’s been here all along, we just didn’t have an official diagnosis for it before!’. To the tune of six times the need?

Maybe the 20 somethings in their waiting rooms decided to stroke checks for $10K for a fertility doctor because that was so much more ‘rewarding’ and ‘enjoyable’ than a trip to disney or a cruise...

Oh puuuuhleeze. Women are seeking treatment and in vitro well passed the previous age that most quit even having menses.

” If you make it to 25 without having ‘completed your perfect 2 child family’ they think there’s something wrong with you” This is the problem with having specialists... if you aren’t in need of their services then they go broke. Hence, they find a way for you to need their services. Some of this comes by advertising. Some of this comes from people watching too much television and social media.

My own daughter who is 27 hasn’t had children yet.....AND we live in the rural south. OOOOOOMG!!! No one asks why or anything else. Your state flag indicates New Jersey...so give me a citation for your ‘rural south’ number.

“To the tune of six times the need?” This makes no economic sense.

” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that in 2006, about 1 out of 12 births in the U.S. were to first-time mothers older than 35, compared to 1 out of 100 in 1970. In other words, only about 1% of first-time mothers were 35 or older in 1970; this number increased eightfold to about 8% in 2006.”

I could go on but I won’t. You really are being ridiculous. People put off having children just like they put off getting married. There are more of ALL types of specialists these days. This doesn’t mean we have more of a particular need than before it means the human body is complex and by studying how it works medicine has created specialties that didn’t exist 20,30,40 or 50 years ago.

“Maybe the 20 somethings in their waiting rooms decided to stroke checks for $10K for a fertility doctor because that was so much more ‘rewarding’ and ‘enjoyable’ than a trip to disney or a cruise...” That’s just plain crude. I don’t know who are angry at but it is misplaced. It isn’t plastics, it isn’t things in the water or any of the other ‘conspiracy’ theories out there. People chose NOT to have children for lots of reasons. In the past, folks said well I guess God hasn’t blessed us yet. If you tell me that the world view has changed I will agree.... but it is not plastics in the water.

You never responded to my saccharin story so how about this set...you do remember Alar and the apple scare; or how about beef ALL being contaminated with BSE; or any of a dozen other scientific frauds...(and let us not forget AWG).

You need to actually read these studies to find out methodologies and sample size etc etc to understand whether the results have ANY meaning. Moreover you cannot automatically make animal to human correlations....you just can’t.

I know it probably shocks you but not every ‘scientist’ is an honest broker. They have to get funding from SOMEWHERE and all too many will make sure that whatever they test and write keeps the money flowing.

I agree. Something has changed since WW2: synthetic hormones were developed, and began to be used in medicine, and as growth promoters in cattle and poultry.

Today, synthetic female hormones (estrogens and progestins) are used in birth control pills and for treating all manner of womens ailments, and as a treatment in pregnancies where the mother is thought to be in danger of miscarrying or going into premature labour.

If you look through my posting history, you’ll see that I’m trying to draw people’s attention to what the earliest of these substances (an artificial estrogen called DES) did to biologically male people who were exposed to it in the womb. Its use during pregnancy caused effects including intersex-related genital abnormalities; impaired fertility; hypogonadism (abnormally low testosterone production in adult life); and “gender dysphoria”. The link between DES and transsexuality is so strong, that I think the whole transgender phenomenon of recent years could largely be down to the use of these substances. DES is no longer used, however I think it’s highly likely that other female hormone derivatives still in use can produce similar effects (and if I’m right about what happened to me, they definitely can!).

It amazes me that people are getting so worked up about traces of weakly estrogenic industrial compounds such as BPA and pthalates, when women are routinely putting high doses of powerful synthetic hormones in their bodies. Any medical use of these drugs is (more or less by definition) going to be enough to have biologically significant effects. Medicines are chemicals too, and just because something was prescribed by a doctor doesn’t stop it from causing harm as well as good.

“Black Agnes”, you’ve mentioned part of the problem: DES. It didn’t just affect women, it had devastating effects on males too. Here are three studies showing high rates of urogenital abnormalities and abnormal semen among DES-exposed males. Just under a third of the DES sons in these studies were born with genital abnormalities, and a similar percentage had abnormal semen. I can only view the abstracts, but all 3 studies seem to be based on the Dieckmann Cohort, which was made up of several hundred mothers and their children who were originally part of a study in the 1950s (that showed that DES was competely ineffective at preventing miscarriages). This appears to be the only case-controlled study group in existence of DES sons who were exposed to the standard “Smith and Smith” treatment regimen; it turns out that a second, larger group of “DES sons” at the Mayo Institute were exposed to much smaller doses of DES than was typical for most DES sons worldwide (I’m fairly sure this was done deliberately, as a way of hiding the true extent of the problems being experienced by DES sons).

J Reprod Med. 1976 Apr;16(4):147-53. “Structural and functional abnormalities in the sex organs of male offspring of mothers treated with diethylstilbestrol (DES).”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/772199

J Urol. 1977 Apr;117(4):477-80. “Pathological semen and anatomical abnormalities of the genital tract in human male subjects exposed to diethylstilbestrol in utero.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/850321

J Urol. 1979 Jul;122(1):36-9. “Association of diethylstilbestrol exposure in utero with cryptorchidism, testicular hypoplasia and semen abnormalities.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37351

Regarding your links on epigenetics, if you’ve had anything to do with hormones, you’ll soon discover that dose does make a difference, and larger doses have greater effects than smaller ones. Frankly I’m sceptical about the claim that BPA etc are the reason why rates of infertility are soaring and there’s suddenly so many gender-blended people about. Not when so many women of childbearing age are being given much higher doses of pharmaceutical hormones. Just because they’re prescribed by a doctor doesn’t alter the fact that medical hormones are endocrine disrupting chemicals too.

I agree that it is quite scary that these substances do seem to be able to produce effects that can be passed down through the generations though. I’ve been told by several people now that there are 3rd generation effects from DES exposure, and my friend Jill Escher thinks transgenerational effects of progestin exposure are responsible for the autism epidemic that’s been taking place in recent years.

http://www.germlineexposures.org/jill-escher-qa.html

http://jme.endocrinology-journals.org/content/49/2/R61.long

Endocrine systems can be altered epigenetically by substances that don’t even bind to the endocrine receptors themselves.

This paper specifically discusses the issues WRT DES and other epigenetic disruptors.

And low, and slow, seem to work even better. Lead works this way:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3555228/

I’ve tried to find full length articles.

Your friend is stepping on a third rail wrt autism and the environment. Hopefully that works out for her. Anyone who suggests it’s anything other than parental (you need to spank that kid!) or genetic (parents were geeky of course their kid will be a head banging diaper wearing teen, what were they expecting?!) is usually run out of town with tar and feathers of some sort.

Black Agnes, sorry I can’t reply to your emails, apparently I’m “too new” to use that feature! To briefly answer your questions, I’m one of a family of six (3 brothers, 3 sisters). I’m the odd one out, physically I look quite different from them (very feminine-looking when I was younger, and I have a “eunuchoid habitus”, a type of body structure that’s often seen in cases of intersex, which makes you look a bit like a cross between a man and a woman). I don’t identify as a woman, however I’ve always had some weird female thing going on in the background, which I now think is because part of my brain development went down the female pathway instead of the male one. The rest of my family are very average-looking people who’ve gone on to live uneventful lives.

My fertility was OK when I was younger and I had two children of my own, however I’ve since developed acute secondary hypogonadism (my hypothalamus, the brain region that controls hormones, has stopped sending the signal that tells my testicles to produce testosterone). This seems to be one of the things that quite commonly goes wrong with DES sons, judging by some of the personal stories I’ve read.

Basically I’ve got some of the symptoms of being intersexed, but my genitals are fully male (apart from being born with a hydrocele), and I score as quite strongly male in most brain sex tests too. When I was trying to figure all this out in 2011, the conclusion I eventually reached was that something happened partway through the second trimester of an otherwise normal pregnancy, that catastropically disrupted my endocrine system so that for a few weeks I stopped producing any testosterone. Since the default developmental pathway is female and male development only occurs if there’s testosterone present, I developed as male for most of the pregnancy but had a few weeks where I developed as female instead. Those few weeks appear to have coincided with the early stages of building the permanent structure of my brain (something which doesn’t start until about 16 weeks after conception).

There’s no way any conventional intersex condition can cause total suppression of testosterone for a short period and otherwise normal male testosterone. I feel horrible for saying this, but it does look a lot like my mother took an overdose of something (probably birth control pills), at around the time she’d have first felt me moving inside her. I’m unlikely to ever know for sure if that’s what happened, but it does tie in with what I remember of her behaviour when I was young, and there is something that happened later in my childhood that makes me think she was hiding a guilty secret along those lines.

I’ve got a lot in common with DES sons, but it seems like less of my psychology is female than is typically the case for them, and there was absolutely no medical reason why my mother would have been prescribed DES either. I feel quite bad even talking about it in public, but I think it’s important that people know what happened with DES, and that the synthetic female hormones in contraceptive pills appear to have similar effects on male development too. One of the people in an online hypogonadism group I belong to is quite severely intersexed (and presumably hypogonadal), and his mother told him that she’d taken contraceptive pills while she was pregnant with him, so it’s not just me.

Whoa. I’m so sorry about your physical issues. That really stinks.

I’ve found that my PCOS got worse the older I got as well.

Do read the book on iodine supplementation. That helped my symptoms a LOT.

Do either of your children have any suspicious symptoms that might indicate further epigenetic alterations? You might encourage them to as much as possible stay away from such things.

I’m sorry this happened to you. I have never trusted the birth control pill. We had a series of commercials in this country where the punch line was ‘It’s not nice to fool mother nature!’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxPY0BbrnjY

There’s no question that you likely had some sort of exposure of some sort. But, as I said in my emails, the connection between that sort of event, and BEHAVIORAL issues later on in humans is very very much a 3rd rail. Particularly with the issues you’re exploring right now. I don’t look for that to change any time soon. I hope to be wrong in this however.

And the exposure could have been totally inadvertent. Maybe your parents were driving along an industrial parkway when some sort of unscheduled toxic release was underway. Rules and regulations were very different with this sort of thing prior to the mid 70’s.

And, seriously, the exposure could have been to your mother when she was developing in your grandmother’s womb. The egg that formed you, with the ‘directions’ written therein, formed in your grandmother’s womb when she was pregnant with your mother. There’s a period of time when the egg tissue is differentiating so it’s entirely possible that an exposure one time mayn’t have effected all your mother’s eggs.

I’m not sure that all this stuff is bad, or even does half of what they think it does. But we avoid stuff along the lines of this, just to be sure:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/08/25/how-to-protect-yourself-from-these-five-pervasive-toxins.aspx

If you are overweight, keep in mind that many of these substances are stored in the fat cells. And weightloss will free them. THC does the same thing in fact. I know someone that had been ‘clean’ from the weed for several years, lost a whole bunch of weight and tested positive for cannabis use.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.