According to experts, 49% of people need technical assistance to get their child pregnant by 2050.

Leading epidemiologists warned that reduced sperm counts are a threat to human survival.

Dr. Shana Swan said the imminent infertility crisis is a global in her provocative new book, Countdown: How the Modern World Threatens Sperm Count, Changes Reproductive Development in Men and Women, and Threatens Humanity’s Future. Said it was a threat.

According to Dr. Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, sperm count decline can pose as great a threat as a climate crisis.

In this book, she writes: “The current state of reproductive problems cannot last any longer without threatening human survival.”

She is also the author of a groundbreaking 2017 study that revealed that sperm counts worldwide have declined by more than half in the last 40 years.

And all the signs suggest that the downward orbit will only continue in the coming decades.

Only about 1.9 percent of all babies born in the United States became pregnant using artificial reproductive technology.

By 2050, that will change, Dr. Swan insists on her new book.

By then, Dr. Swan predicts that most people around the world will not be able to get pregnant without technical assistance.

She says it would be the result of a decrease in sperm counts in men around the world.

There are many causes of infertility, but Dr. Swan focuses on a sneaky main suspect, a household chemical called phthalates.

According to a 2017 study by Dr. Shanna Swan, sperm counts in Western men fell by more than 50% between 1973 and 2011, dropping by about 1% annually.She believes that a chemical called phthalates is the main suspect

Phthalate esters are all kinds of products. They make the plastic supple, allow our skin to absorb the lotion, and help make food packaging like cellophane elastic and airtight.

However, they penetrate our food and our body from these packages, where they do much more insidious and destroy the endocrine system that controls hormones, including testosterone.

Dr. Swan and many other scientists believe this is a major driver of the plunge in male sperm counts.

Her 2017 study showed a shocking decrease in male sperm counts, especially among Western men.

According to the Mayo Clinic, men with less than 15 million sperm per mL, or less than 39 million sperm per ejaculation, are at risk of infertility, although sperm shape and motility, or movement, are important.

It is estimated that one in seven couples in the United States is already infertile as a result of infertility problems with one or both partners.

Personally, it was estimated that about 9% of men were already infertile in 2018, the latest estimate of the CDC.

According to Dr. Swan’s 2017 study, it’s much more than it was infertility in 2017.

She found that sperm counts in Western men fell by nearly 60 percent between 1973 and 2011.

On average, sperm counts decreased by just over 1 percent each year.

In that proportion, the proportion of men with infertility is now about 12 percent. And if that continues, by 2050, 41 percent of men will be infertile.

As sperm count and quality decline, many of the population will be forced to use assisted reproductive technology (ART), Dr. Swan told the Daily Mail.com.

She calls this result the “third step” of a series of problems.

“Before that, you have to start with a decrease in sperm count and semen quality, including reduced fertility. If a man’s sperm count is really low, your only option is actually assisted reproductive technology. It’s about using medical care, “said Dr. Swan. ..

According to her study, sperm counts have declined since at least 1973, but their scale has rarely been done before, so it’s unclear when things actually started to decline.

Phthalates were invented in the 1920s and marketed in 1931.

They have begun to be used primarily in products such as PVC, tough and stretchable plastics, and insect repellents.

But since then, they have exploded. They are found in beauty products such as shampoos, nail polishes and sanitary pads, in vinyl fake flooring, in IV bags and shower curtains, oils, detergents, and possibly foods wrapped in plastic.

And they are probably in you.

A CDC study that measured American phthalate metabolites between 2003 and 2004 found “measurable levels of many phthalate metabolites in the general population.”

Authorities have actually found that women’s levels are higher than men’s, probably because shampoos and cosmetics contain chemicals.

Researchers at the CDC pointed out that the detection of these chemicals does not necessarily mean that they are harming anyone.

However, according to Dr. Swan’s research, most of us have subtle effects while ingesting and absorbing phthalates at low levels, which can be easily confused with other problems. there is.

Factors such as obesity and exercise also affect fertility in both men and women.

Decreased sperm count was most pronounced in Western men (“unselected Westerners”) who were unaware of their fertility status. On average, these men had 337.5 sperms per mL of semen. By 2011, that number had dropped to 137.5 per mL

When asked by Future Human how much phthalates contribute to the decline in male fertility compared to obesity and other increasing factors, Dr. Swan does not yet know, but they are. He explained that it is likely to be intertwined.

“That’s a great question, and I don’t know the answer to it. Based on my work, I believe it’s substantive,” she said.

“But even lifestyle factors that look quite different from these chemicals aren’t really that different.

“For example, one lifestyle factor that affects fertility is obesity. Many of these chemicals are obesity. They cause obesity and interfere with hormones related to satiety and metabolism. They It increases the chances of fattening us, so obesity is on the path between exposure and infertility.

Dr. Swan is a leader in environmental epidemiology and reproductive epidemiology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

She also has a higher incidence of erectile dysfunction in men who work with BPA, a type of phthalate used in food packaging, and sexually in women with high levels of chemicals in the bloodstream. He added that he was more likely to be dissatisfied.

Many signs indicate the effects of phthalates on sex, but what exactly are you doing?

Phthalate esters appear to disrupt the circuits that exist between two parts of the brain and the male reproductive organs of females.

It is known as the hypothalamus and pituitary gland (the hormonal regulatory part of the brain), and the gonads, which are the testes of men, or the HPG axis of the ovaries of women.

This circuit controls a tight feedback loop that produces sex hormones that play an important role in libido and sexual reproduction, and helps to return to the HPG axis and regulate it.

Off-quiltering this axis also lowers the levels of sex hormones such as testosterone and estrogen. If effective or long-lasting, it can disrupt reproduction.

Scientists believe that the way phthalates bind to receptors on the HPG axis also does this.

And phthalates are making a powerful two-sided attack because they also make us feel full or hungry and cause havoc in the hormones that contribute to obesity.

Exposure to phthalates is not a health problem with obvious treatments. For one thing, they are everywhere. In fact, scientists often call them “chemicals everywhere.”

Western men (black line) saw the sharpest decline in both sperm concentration (left, 52% drop) and sperm count (right, almost 60% drop).

You may not even know that you are using the product with them. Legally, if they are used in ingredients that add fragrance to a product, they can simply be disclosed as “fragrances”.

Phthalate esters pass through the body relatively quickly, but because of their high permeability, they are constantly flooded with phthalates, sufficient to interfere with hormones during their short passage through the human body. There seems to be some time.

And they seem to be inherited by our offspring.

Dr. Patricia Hunt of Washington State University said that, first of all, when male mice are exposed to these chemicals early in life, then their offspring, and then their offspring, the chemicals are exposed over time. Showed to accumulate. , “Dr. Swan told Future Human.

“The chemicals are there and never disappear. However, she showed that taking an exposed man out of exposure would take three to four generations, but would return to reproductive health.

She calls this the “good news”, but phthalates need to be eliminated.

And since we’re not close to it, fertility will suffer in the future-and already, Dr. Swan says.

“I think that’s a big problem. For example, the proportion of surrogacy is increasing. The proportion of assisted reproductive technology is increasing,” she told Future Human.

“We are increasingly relying on those technical solutions to give birth to children, and I don’t think people are completely happy to reproduce that way.”