Many folks have heard that those Preparation H requiring, obscenely narrow sprint bicycle seats are associated with erectile dysfunction, and that certain antidepressants can cause DNA damage in sperm. But in our everyday lives we encounter many more sperm slayers as well. What is more, the havoc they wreak can range from scrambling the DNA of your favorite swimmers to interfering with, well, their ability to swim.

The good news, according to a recent expose on the matter, is that you can do something about most of them. Here’s a summary of the most common “sex offenders” and the steps you can take to protect the troops:

Heated car seats-For the unfortunate souls who live in the Midwest and Northeast, few luxuries are more welcome than a heated car seat. But those contraptions are frying your sperm, plain and simple. The same goes for strategically placed heating pads and lengthy spells in a hot tub. Sperm production, it turns out, is done best at temperatures several degrees below normal body temperature…that’s why a man’s package hangs down like it does in the first place. External heat sources defeat nature’s way, guys.
What to do: Jack-up the car heater and bag the heated seat whenever possible. And don’t fall asleep in the hot tub.

Morning Ablutions-Your soap and shampoo most likely contain phthalates, which are organic compounds that interfere with male hormone synthesis and have been associated with infertility, birth defects, and other nasty things. Phthalates are also in your vinyl shower curtain and probably in the tile cleaner you’re using to clean the shower (if you clean the shower, that is). As an added bonus, the heat from your shower helps release these chemicals.
What to do: Use organic or plain, unscented soaps and shampoos. If a personal care product has a scent, it probably contains phthalates. Check the labels on the soaps and shampoos you do buy. Look for the word “phthalate” or its many aliases, which include DMP, DEP, DAP and DPP. If you can afford it, go with the glass door on the shower. It’s more aesthetically pleasing and less prone to flooding, anyway.

Sex toys-Sadly, these handy gadgets also contain phthalates. The worst offenders are those containing so-called “jelly-rubber,” or vinyl. Most dildos and vibrators are in this category. What a bummer.
What to do: Go with products made of silicone or glass. Remember, this affects your partner, too.

Cash register receipts-Nearly half of them are coated with bisphenol-A (BPA), an estrogen-like chemical that has been linked to erectile dysfunction, loss of sexual desire and ejaculation difficulties, not to mention heart disease (we have covered various BPA stories over the years, most recently here and here).
What to do: If you really need receipts, store them in an envelope rather than a pocket or your wallet, so you’re not constantly handling them. For extra credit, don’t recycle receipts, because BPA leaches from them into landfills and eventually finds its way into the water supply.  (more…)

In the 4 months since the Deepwater Horizon blew up and oil began spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, scientists have been trying to understand the magnitude of the gusher’s ecological impact.

The gusher has been plugged thankfully, although there is no consensus on how much damage has been done. Some believe the gulf has largely avoided an ecological disaster. Others say that the spill has pushed already damaged ecosystems to the brink.

Take those ghastly pictures of oiled birds, for example. Officials say they’ve found only 1,200 of them, a fraction of the 35,000 that were discovered after the Exxon Valdez disaster. Of course, officials only count the birds they find. Some scientists believe the number is much higher.

“It’s an instinctive response: They’re hiding from predators while they recover,” Kerry St. Pé, told the Washington Post. St. Pe, who oversees a marsh protection program, added “They plan to recover, and they don’t. They just die.”

What about coastal marshes, whose oil-stained shores made regular appearances on the evening news? “The marsh grasses, the canes, the mangrove are dying,” Robert Barham, secretary of the state’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries told the Post. “There’s visible evidence that the ecosystem is changed.”

But the National Audubon Society’s Paul Kemp disagreed. According to him, the impact of the spill was small by comparison to the marsh’s existing problems.

“We have a patient that’s dying of cancer, and now they have a sunburn, too,” Kemp said. “What will kill coastal Louisiana is not this oil spill.” (It’s) what was killing it before this oil spill,” he explained, citing erosion and river-control projects.

There is also disagreement about the presence of “plumes” of dissolved or submerged oil offshore. Some scientists claim to have found underwater oil many miles from the gusher.  But an official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said his agency found significant submerged oil only within 6 miles of the well.

“Right now,” John Valentine, a gulf researcher told the Post, “we should be more impressed by what we don’t know than what we do know.”

In years past, environmental catastrophes have helped environmental advocates win some of their biggest victories. In 1969, the Santa Barbara oil spill and images of a river on fire in Cleveland helped drive the passage of several anti-pollution laws. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez disaster helped spark a key clean-air law.

But this year, the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, by far the biggest in US history, hasn’t had the same effect.

The Senate remains gridlocked on an energy bill. Public opinion has barely changed, and the demand for gasoline continues to surge.

It’s not that environmentalists aren’t trying. It’s just that they’re facing headwinds from a lousy economy, general mistrust of government and lingering suspicions from “Climategate,” which were sparked by since disproven allegations that environmental scientists were cooking their data to promote their views about global warming.

The dreadful economic tailspin has caused public officials and the public to back-off proposals that would lessen our dependence on fossil fuels, for example. Just 2 summers ago, gasoline cost $4-a-gallon, and millions cannot afford a return to such prices.

A related factor is the site of the oil spill. Louisiana residents, devastated by the calamity, have targeted BP rather than the oil industry itself, in part because the industry powers the state’s economy.

These issues are reflected in recent opinion polls which show that after the spill, only about 53% of people are concerned about climate change. That is unchanged from January, and down from 63% before the economy went south.

“It’s the short-term concerns overriding longer-term benefits” of greenhouse-gas laws, Ralph Izzo told the Washington Post. Izzo is CEO of the Public Service Enterprise Group, a New Jersey-based utility that supports carbon emission price control legislation.

In the 3 months since the Deepwater Horizon blew up and oil began spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, scientists have been trying to understand the magnitude of the gusher’s ecological impact.

So far, there is no consensus on the matter. Some believe the gulf has largely avoided an ecological disaster. Others say that the spill has pushed already damaged ecosystems to the brink.

Take those ghastly pictures of oiled birds, for example. Officials say they’ve found only 1,200 of them, a fraction of the 35,000 that were discovered after the Exxon Valdez disaster. Of course, officials only count the birds they find. Some scientists believe the number is much higher.

“It’s an instinctive response: They’re hiding from predators while they recover,” Kerry St. Pé, told the Washington Post. Pe, who oversees a marsh protection program, added “They plan to recover, and they don’t. They just die.”

What about coastal marshes, whose oil-stained shores make regular appearances on the evening news? “The marsh grasses, the canes, the mangrove are dying,” Robert Barham, secretary of the state’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries told the Post. “There’s visible evidence that the ecosystem is changed.”

But the National Audubon Society’s Paul Kemp disagreed. According to him, the impact of the spill was small by comparison to the marsh’s existing problems.

“We have a patient that’s dying of cancer, and now they have a sunburn, too,” Kemp said. “What will kill coastal Louisiana is not this oil spill.” (It’s) what was killing it before this oil spill,” he explained, citing erosion and river-control projects.

There is also disagreement about the presence of “plumes” of dissolved or submerged oil offshore. Some scientists claim to have found underwater oil many miles from the gusher.  But an official at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said his agency found significant submerged oil only within 6 miles of the well.

“Right now,” John Valentine, a gulf researcher told the Post, “we should be more impressed by what we don’t know than what we do know.”

Until Friday, the UN-sponsored climate conference in Copenhagen had been a rather dull affair, characterized as it was by the bickering of mid-level dignitaries and the usual menagerie of activists and hangers-on outside the convention center.

But on Friday, there was significant news.

An ad-hoc UN working group released a document that will likely serve as a starting point for negotiations when the big boys roll into town later this week.

The document proposes a deal in which industrial nations cut carbon-based emissions between 25 and 45% compared with 1990 levels by 2020, and major developing countries like China and India cut theirs over the same period by 15 to 30%.

In addition, all countries would reduce emissions by 50 to 95% by 2050.

The document skated over details like how much money rich countries would fork over to poor ones to help them cope with global warming, or what levels of global temperature increases would be deemed “tolerable.”

Still, it was a start.

Aside from survival of the planet as we know it, the economies of every nation on Earth could depend on the outcome of this agreement. Rifts have developed between developed and emerging economies and between the world’s 2 major carbon emitters, China and the US.

The 2 superpowers disagree about their obligations to fix the mess, and warily eye each other in advance of the battle for supremacy in Green technology, which seems certain to drive national economic success for the rest of the century, much as information technology has driven US economic success since the 1970s.

Costa Rican delegate Ricardo Ulate, described the skirmishes for the Washington Post  as “a game where a new economic hegemony is being developed.”

That may be, but what he’s seen so far is just the undercard.

The main event begins later this week, at which point heads of government from 60 countries will have arrived in Copenhagen.

“We’re getting into the big leagues,” said Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, vice president for global policy at Conservation International. “The heavyweights are coming.”

This week, the Senate will bicker over health reform, EHR vendors will continue their anxious wait for government agencies to release Meaningful Use criteria on which their financial viability depends, people  will continue arguing whether middle-aged women should get mammograms, and world leaders from 100 countries will convene in Copenhagen to hammer out a new agreement that prevents or at least slows down global warming.

There’s not much doubt which issue will have the most impact on the health of US citizens, at least those who are around 50-100 years from now.

In 1997, the global family of nations released a document known as the Kyoto protocol. Its goal was to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions to levels 5.2% below those produced in 1990 by year-end, 2012.

Since then, 187 countries have signed the document, including China, Russia, India and every country in Europe. But Uncle Sam, the source of nearly one-third of the world’s carbon emissions, never did. 

In the absence of leadership from the world’s biggest offender, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose 33% since the treaty was signed.

That’s despite the ready availability of cheap, low-carbon technologies which can be deployed in both developed and developing nations. Electricity can be produced by wind and solar plants, hydropower and nuclear fission, and cars and trucks can run on electricity and biofuels.

Views on the matter of climate change are as divergent as can be. Some are convinced that life on the planet hangs in the balance: we must reach an accord in Copenhagen and make it stick in major offending countries like the US…or else. Others think the global warming is unrelated to human activity and is likely to self-correct in a century or two.

Nobody really knows whether global warming is man-made or how bad it will get, so it’s no wonder that it’s been hard to persuade people to spend money on a fix. It’s the mother of all externalities.

Yet as The Economist points out, this uncertainty is precisely why man needs to tackle global warming, now. If we knew that temperatures would rise by just a few degrees in the next century, then the argument to let things go would seem somewhat reasonable.

But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was organized by the UN to develop evidence-based consensus on the matter, and which used every shred of evidence it could find, could do no better than give a range. It concluded that if things are left as they are, by the end of this century the average temperature on planet Earth will rise somewhere between 2-11ºF.

No sane person can argue that temperature elevations near the top end of this estimate would be anything less than catastrophic. More than a billion people would be displaced by coastal flooding, and at least that many would be severely affected by associated climate change.

But there’s some good news. Assuming humans approach the problem smartly (as discussed for example, here), the costs of averting that kind of catastrophe are not nearly as great as many think…about 1% of the world’s global economic output for the next several years.

On average, US homeowners spend about that percentage of their income insuring their homes. Heck, just last year, the world spent 5% of total global output bailing out the banking system.

The technology to control global warming is here. Global warming is a problem with unknown but potentially catastrophic consequences that can be averted with no worse than mild economic consequences. How could we not do this?

Occupational exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) is associated with erectile dysfunction, loss of sexual desire and ejaculation difficulties, according to US and Chinese scientists. Their report is one of the first to show this negative association in humans. Numerous earlier studies had done so in animals.

BPA is chemically similar to estrogen. It is used to produce polycarbonate plastics, and can be found in baby bottles, water bottles and cans used to package food and beverages.

The chemical leaches from these products into food, and can be detected in the urine of nearly every American.

In animal studies, BPA had been associated with infertility, early onset of puberty, weight gain, cancer and diabetes.

Last summer, the FDA issued a provisional ruling that BPA is safe at levels found in the US population. That ruling was disputed by its own advisory panel. Many places including Canada have banned BPA from baby bottles.

De-Kun Li and colleagues studied 634 Chinese factory workers. Of these, 230 were exposed to high levels of BPA on the job, and 404 had no such occupational exposure.

The scientists measured BPA levels in the air and the worker’s food and in their urine as well. At the same time, they surveyed workers about sexual experiences.

Workers with occupational exposure to BPA had more than 4 times the risk of erectile dysfunction, were 4 times more likely to report low sexual desire, and were 7 times more likely to experience ejaculation difficulties. The risk of these problems increased with urinary BPA concentrations.

The factory workers’ urinary BPA levels were about 50 times higher than that found in US males.

“Critics dismissed the animal studies, saying, ‘Show us the human studies,’” Li told the Los Angeles Times. “Now we have a human study and this can’t be dismissed,” he added.

The study appears in Human Reproduction.

Only 72% of Americans believe global warming is happening, down from 80% just a year ago, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. 

The increased skepticism is derived mainly by people describing themselves as Republicans and independents.

Three years ago, 76% of Republican voters believed the phenomenon was real, but that has dropped to just 54% now.

The tail-off among independents was from 86% to 71%. Among democrats, the dip was from 92% to 86%.

Despite these evolving trends, a slight majority, 53% of respondents still support legislation that would cap emissions and institute trade pollution allowances. A similar number, 55% believe the US should cut carbon emissions regardless of whether developing countries like China and India choose to do so.

The increasing political divide on the issue is surfacing just as President Obama and congressional Democrats have stepped up efforts to enact new climate legislation and at least make a credible presence at next week’s global summit on the matter in Copenhagen. 

“It’s a sad state of affairs when science becomes subject to partisan politics,” Democratic pollster Mark Mellman told the Washington Post. “It can only be attributed to the sense that this issue has become part of a political battle.”

Amanda Feinberg, a retired secretary who lives in South Williamsport, Pa., told the Post she began changing her views on global warming shortly after Al Gore released his movie documentary on the subject, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

“He just seemed a little radical in his views,” said Feinberg, a Republican. “I don’t deny it’s happening, I just think it’s just an evolution of nature.”

Another Republican respondent, Lisa Woolcott doubted whether Americans would support policies that raised energy prices amid the current recession.

“I don’t think the public’s going to back it,” she said. “It’s all they can do to pay their electric bill and put gas in their cars. It’s like, let’s get through Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

In a finding that would be laughable if it weren’t so scary, scientists have determined that the chemicals which helped avoid a potential global environmental catastrophe—the hole in the ozone layer—are contributing to another one: global warming.

The compounds in question are hydrofluorocarbons, also known as HFCs.

They were introduced a decade ago as replacements for chlorofluorocarbons, ozone-depleting gases that had been used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and the production of foam insulation.

The ozone hole is shrinking all right, but hydrofluorocarbons are basically greenhouse gases on steroids: molecule for molecule, they have 5,000 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide.

And unless we find replacements for the replacements, scientists warn these puppies can cancel out other efforts to combat global warming.

“Whatever targets you thought you were going to make,” David Fahey, a physicist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told the Washington Post, “it will be undermined by the fact that you have . . . additional emissions that you hadn’t planned on.”

Hydroflurocarbons now account for nearly 2% of US-based climate-warming emissions, according to the EPA.  Good old carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, is responsible for 85% of the problem. Methane, which comes from farm animals (don’t ask) and decomposing trash causes most of the rest.

But the HFC problem is growing rapidly. By 2050, scientists believe, HFCs in the atmosphere will be equivalent to about 6 years’ worth carbon dioxide emissions.

“You have this moment when you could nip this problem in the bud and avoid this very large growth of a dangerous chemical,” David Doniger, a policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate center told the Post. “Now, in the next couple of years, is when you have to do this.”

Tian Lihua had just clocked in for work at a textile mill outside Jilin when she became nauseated, then dizzy. Moments later she passed out. In the next few days 1,200 of her co-workers developed medical issues ranging from seizures to shortness of breath and transient paralysis.

“When I came to, I could hear the doctors talking,” she told the New York Times last month. “They said I had a reaction to unknown substances.”

Tian and her colleagues believe those “unknown substances” had wafted downwind from the Jilin Connell Chemical Plant which makes aniline, a notoriously toxic chemical used to produce rubber, dyes,  polyurethane and herbicides.

Local hospitals began seeing befallen workers immediately after the plant opened this spring. On a bad day, so many workers showed up that the hospital was forced to put 2 in each bed.

The State Administration of Work Safety initially stated on its Web site that the cause was a “chemical leak,” but hours later the statement was pulled down.

Now, local health officials as well as those dispatched from Beijing contend the entire event is due to mass hysteria….psychological reactions on a massive scale to a presumed chemical exposure.

The officials have admonished the workers to “get a hold of their emotions” and get back to work, say afflicted individuals and their loved ones.

 “How could a psychological illness cause so much pain and misery?” asked 29 year-old Zhang Fusheng, who appeared to a Times reporter to be short of breath despite being hooked up to an oxygen mask. “My only wish is to get better so I can go back to work and take care of my family.”

The Ministry of Health in Beijing refused to release details of its investigation, but local officials insist they found no evidence of a toxic exposure.

The plant is partially owned by local government officials. Its president is Song Zhiping, who is also a representative to China’s legislative body, the National People’s Congress.