Are we on the eve of self-destruction through “living” in a chemical environment?
Shanna H. Swan, Ph.D., is one of the world’s leading environmental and reproductive epidemiologists and a professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. An award-winning scientist, her work examines the impact of environmental exposures, including chemicals such as phthalates and Bisphenol A, on men’s and women’s reproductive health and the neurodevelopment of children.
In 2017, Dr. Shanna Swan and her research team made an alarming discovery: Western men have experienced a 50% decline in sperm counts over the past 40 years. How did this happen and what does this mean for our future?
Dr. Swan came to her conclusions after examining 185 studies involving close to 45,000 healthy men. The result sent shockwaves around the globe—but the story didn’t end there. It turns out that our sexual development is changing in broader ways, for both men and women and even other species, and that the modern world is on pace to become an infertile one—by 2050 a large section of the global population will need technological assistance to procreate.