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Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race
Top of the pile
81
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
52/100Critics
96/100Scholars
95/100Author:
Shanna H. Swan, Stacey Colino
Publisher:
Scribner
Date:
February 23, 2021
In 2017, author Shanna Swan and her team of researchers completed a major study. They found that over the past four decades, sperm levels among men in Western countries have dropped by more than 50 percent. They came to this conclusion 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 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. How and why could this happen? What is hijacking our fertility and our health? Count Down unpacks these questions, explaining the science and repercussions of these worldwide threats and providing simple and practical guidelines for effectively avoiding chemical goods (from water bottles to shaving cream) both as individuals and societies.
What The Reviewers Say
If you’ve smugly enjoyed the dystopian worlds of The Handmaid’s Tale (where infertility is triggered in part by environmental pollutants) or Children of Men (where humanity is on the precipice of extinction) — and believed that these stories were rooted firmly in fantasy — Shanna Swan’s Count Down will serve as an awakening.
Accelerating problems with reproduction conjure frightful images of fertility-challenged future societies, such as the one depicted in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. A convincing plea for heightened awareness of rising reproductive jeopardy and the imperative of eliminating environmental toxins makes this book both alarming and crucial..
An urgent examination of a global problem that requires vastly more attention than it currently receives.
... thought-provoking.
