Atrazine in Australian water affects male fertility | Hacker News Reader

Atrazine in Australian water affects male fertility

medicalxpress.com

55 pointspimpampum16 comments

Summary (though I highly recommend reading this)

1. Men's sperm counts have gone down by half in the last 30 years in industrialized countries, nobody has established why. [A]

2. The environment is full of (>1,400) endocrine-disrupting chemicals that may be an answer. One such example is Atrazine.

3. "We examined two doses of ATZ which included the 'safe' level for drinking water, determined by the Australian government, as well as a 10-fold higher dose delivered to the mice in drinking water from weaning until 12 weeks of age,"

4. "Our results showed significant effects on the reproductive and general health of male mice." Including reduced sperm count.

5. Interestingly, "We found a change in gene expression in the liver following ATZ exposure. Two genes implicated in fat uptake were found to be over-expressed, an early stage of 'fatty liver disease,"

6. Lower doses over a long exposure time may potentially do more damage than a high dose.

7. This study has been accepted for publication last month. The pair is continuing to do more research.

-- [A] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sperm-count-dropp...

RE: safe levels and the sheer number of chemicals flooding into the environment, I wonder whether in some cases a given chemical studied in isolation could be safe at a given level, yet have unexpectedly strong negative effects when combined with the presence of other chemicals -- also perhaps at or below their respective "safe" levels that were determined by studying them in isolation.

As countries become more wealthy and educated, they use more endocrine disrupting chemicals and thus have lower birth rates.

I think that one is a lot tougher to prove causation with, especially because in the article it says the EU banned Atrazine, yet they all have falling birth rates as well. I think that one has more to do with higher education and income.

There are confounding co-factors to birth rate in advanced economies. it would be grossly simplistic to ascribe the birth rate to falling sperm motility levels, when advanced societies offer IVF and assisted reproduction often on the public purse.

I suspect the economics here are stronger than biology: it is too expensive to raise and (privately) educate children and in the developed economies, familys delay childbirth into later years and so tend to have less children.

TL;DR I believe the birth rates in Africa and Asia are varying more as a function of economy, than of insecticide.

"Men's sperm counts have gone down by half in the last 30 years in industrialized countries"

The bad is that this probably extends to other health problems too, besides sperm count.

Otherwise, as this fun comic/charge[1] shows, would not be that a big problem for everyone.

1- https://dilbert.com/strip/2014-04-05

:last addition: Sperm swimming speed is probably affected as well.

How can an individual avoid the effects of groundwater contamination? Is drinking distilled water enough, or does the contamination affect foods?

You shouldn't drink distilled water at all. It's bad for you. I don't know if such a system exists, a machine which would filter out all chemicals which cause endocrine disruption would help. Alternately, if you are so paranoid, you can create distilled water and add safe minerals by some method.

There is a fair amount of bad science about the risks of Atrazine and it's a shame that they referenced some of it (the negative effects on frogs haven't been replicated and there is significant evidence that the paper was not entirely honest about the facts). But of course, I'm not an expert to gauge the accuracy of this paper.

For those who are interested, it's likely that Alex Jones was referring to Atrazine with his "turning the frogs gay" rant (what he was referring to is the paper I mentioned, which claimed to find gonadal deformities in frogs that were exposed to Atrazine).

I'm not a chemist, but one has done a few videos on the topic of Atrazine[1].

[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=s6NDtIU8liw

To be clear, the main thrust seems to be this new paper by unrelated authors : http://www.publish.csiro.au/RD/RD18505

Unfortunately, a lot of pesticide research seems to get caught in a strange limbo where each side can't replicate the others results and accuses the other of bad science.

I too am surprised that companies are unable to reproduce the results finding their products harmful.

Can you cite something a little more meaty than "some youtube guy who claims to be a chemist?" Plenty of bad science out there which gets started in weird ways, but I have no idea if this guy is any better than Alex Jones.

You are referring to the 2002 Hayes study. There was another study done in 2010 by Hayes that showed "atrazine rendered 75% of male frogs sterile and turned one in 10 into females.... Atrazine-exposed males suffered from depressed testosterone, decreased breeding gland size, demasculinized/feminized laryngeal development, suppressed mating behavior, reduced spermatogenesis, and decreased fertility."

> the negative effects on frogs haven't been replicated

The liable chemical company responsible for atrazine said they could not replicate the study.

> Alex Jones

What layman commentators say about a published paper has little bearing.

> a few videos

Looking through their videos they have "The Young Turks are Morons", "You should not fund Greenpeace", "Kyle Kulinski - Lazy", more anti-Greenpeace videos. Ok.

The video text says the EPA wanted to repeat Hayes findings. This was not the process the EPA fostered (incidentally, the EPA is currently run by a coal industry lobbyist, taking over for another fossil fuel advocate who said he was the "leading advocate against the EPA's activist agenda").

The last YouTube text paragraph is correct - Syngenta, the company which makes atrazine did experiments and said atrazine was not harmful.

The text also says Hayes "resisted...answering questions about his data". Syngenta had a formal ethics complaint launched against Hayes at Berkeley, had his personal life investigated by private investigators (as legally obtained documents show), tried to get his papers retracted etc.

Also it should be noted - Syngenta/Novartis hired Ecorisk to fund Hayes and others to look at atrazine. Hayes found these problems, and there was a subsequent conflict between Hayes and them.

Any how, the OP paper is independent Australian scientists.

> more anti-Greenpeace videos.

Those videos are about how Greenpeace is anti-GMO and how their rhetoric is harming the developing world. Just because Greenpeace has historically had many positive causes doesn't mean they aren't dead wrong with their stance on GMOs. Their attacks against golden rice and scare tactics around GMO seeds given to third-world nations have undoubtedly killed people.

I also was skeptical about being anti-Greenpeace, but their views on GMOs are just simply anti-science.

To get a good model of what is happening, look at the history of the tobacco industry: on the one hand is money on the other—public health. Money can reject reality almost indefinitely.

More examples: climate change, sugar, war machine.

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