Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

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Endocrine disrupting chemicals (mostly phthalates), they are present in most food and bathroom packaging. Any plastic that is flexible.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/the-big-3-why-pht...

"They’ve been shown to be anti-androgenic—in other words, they decrease testosterone. In studies with rats, it’s been shown that if you dose the pregnant mother, the offspring have defects of the male reproductive tract. There have also been studies in humans that have found anti-androgenic effects on development of the male reproductive tract."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/common-chemicals-...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/10/phthala...

There is a mountain of research on these chemicals.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2873014/

"There was also a dose–response relationship between MBzP (the primary hydrolytic metabolite of BBzP) and below WHO reference value sperm concentration. In a recent follow-up study including these 168 men, plus an additional 295 men newly recruited into the study, Hauser et al. (2006) confirmed the associations between MBP and increased odds of below-reference sperm concentration and motility. "

One big problem with this whole thing is that the country that has the most possible factors for sperm-count decline, the US (obesity, pollution, circadian cycles disruptions, etc.) is also the country with the smallest measured drop.

That also happens to be the country where the EPA said water and air were clean after the Ohio train derailment [0]. The same EPA that falsifies new chemicals risk assessments as a matter of course [1].

Where the FCC said millions of dead people, many with the same name, wanted net neutrality overturned. And when caught, went ahead and overturned it anyway.

Where the CDC said that masks don't help against an airborne virus, before exaggerating their effectiveness to justify ineffective mandates and lockdowns in schools.

Where whistleblowers are smeared, jailed, and tortured.

Where environmental lawyers are disbarred and jailed by the justice system itself as recrimination for exposing corporate atrocities [3].

Where the military leaves dangerous chemicals around as a matter of routine with absolutely no consequences (other than the organ failures and cancer).

Where the tapwater around the country is hazardous to human health [4].

Where reliable numbers on something as crucial as vaccine effectiveness vs a dangerous pandemic are impossible to obtain.

Where estimates of civilian casualties in its illegal wars are off by 7 figures.

My point: You might want to take official America's numbers on anything and everything with some salt. Including sperm counts.

[0] - https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/11/health/ohio-train-derailm...

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/27/epa-whis...

[2] - https://www.npr.org/2017/12/14/570262688/as-fcc-prepares-net...

[3] - https://www.tbsnews.net/features/panorama/curious-case-steve...

[4] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/31/americas-tap...

If you have any evidence that sperm count figures in the US are being deliberately falsified, you should post it.

I don't.

Didn't claim to.

What is beyond doubt is that US chemical and agri corps have made concerted efforts over decades to infiltrate regulatory agencies, and have a long history of covering up their atrocities.

So, cast a skeptic eye on anything from them, the agencies they're in, and the scientists they fund. If there's any other reasonable take, you should post it.

The united states are not so united that they'd be repeating the same lie from multiple studies/measurements. Also, to the benefit of whom?

The data is very noisy, and the studies often don't match - as pointed out in the article. So I don't know where you get the idea that the data is "united".

As for who benefits: The polluters - big chemical, defense, agri etc; the people who we pay to regulate them (usually people from those industries); the corporate media who takes huge advertising money from those companies; the shareholders of all the above companies; and the politicans responsible for keeping the status quo going.

Take, for example, the Deepwater Horizon spill. The company paid out what, 1 billion in fines? Less than 5% of last years profits. The Obama administration helped minimize reputation damage and accountability. The media - all media - were barred from filming or investigating; not that many in corporate media tried. If shareholders had a problem with the lack of action, or the horrific decision to cover up the spill with Corexit, they were quiet as church-mice about it.

And that's one high profile example, out of hundreds, of just oil spills alone. Then there's the agricultural runoff, the pesticides, the insecticides, the food additives, the chemicals in cosmetics that are banned in other countries, the military waste, the toxins from cars and tire, the industrial accidents, the train derailments...

So... Yeah. There's some vested interests going on there, with no shortage of historical examples to draw from.

>Take, for example, the Deepwater Horizon spill. The company paid out what, 1 billion in fines? Less than 5% of last years profits.

How much should they pay? 100% of profits? Whatever percent you think it should be, do you think that if you spilled a bunch of used oil on the ground should you be fined the equivalent amount of your disposable income?

>The media - all media - were barred from filming or investigating

The wikipedia article[1] for that disaster doesn't seem to have a shortage of media on that topic. There's even photos from the government itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill

> The data is very noisy, and the studies often don't match - as pointed out in the article. So I don't know where you get the idea that the data is "united".

Well the comment you replied to said:

> the US (obesity, pollution, circadian cycles disruptions, etc.) is also the country with the smallest measured drop

and you said that the US is known to lie (with so many examples). So for that above to be a lie, many people across different states need to work in unison, delivering false results.

Also nobody really knows if this effect is really there to begin with, let alone knowing what causes it. People lobbying so organized across the states against an unknown is very unlikely.

This is all one big ad hominem

Sure, it is.

My point stands though. If you're swallowing any US agencies information without salt, you have an incomplete information diet.

Dow, Monsanto, DuPont etc have a long track record of getting their people into agencies via the old US politics revolving door system, and they have every reason to downplay the environmental factors that they have inflicted on the planet, especially American soil (and air and water).

Welcome to Trump’s dysfunction. Source of 7 figure discrepancies in civilian casualties?

> Endocrine disrupting chemicals (mostly phthalates), they are present in most food and bathroom packaging. Any plastic that is flexible.

Citation, please. As I understand it, polyethylene (especially LDPE) and polypropylene are flexible all by themselves and generally contain no plasticizers at all. And they are quite common.

What about your balls being too warm? A lot of people spend all their day inside in heated rooms or in a car with a heated seat.

But then is the heat also increasing in this linear fashion as the sperm count decrease?

It doesn't explain an individual's sperm count declining over time. But more people spending more time indoors with warm balls could explain the average sperm count decreasing.

This TED talk warned us about local warming years ago. https://youtu.be/waO8KKtVgaQ

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