David E Bratt MD

Tri­ni men fir­ing blanks, went the head­line. Not in the street.Chaos erupt­ed on the talk shows the fol­low­ing morn­ing, UNC and PNM sup­port­ers unit­ed for once, brave­ly fac­ing the dan­ger to red-blood­ed Tri­ni man­hood. The cry went up: "Bois bande and pacro wa­ter need­ed ur­gent­ly," nev­er mind that "fir­ing blanks" has noth­ing to do with "im­po­ten­cy," as one promi­nent herbal prac­ti­tion­er an­nounces to the world.

Oth­ers called for more in­for­ma­tion on Ti­sane de Dur­ban, par­rot­ing what the com­pa­ny sell­ing this prepa­ra­tion says: it "has been a pop­u­lar rem­e­dy for cen­turies. Many peo­ple re­ly on its nat­ur­al in­gre­di­ents to give them vigour and vi­tal­i­ty (my em­pha­sis) for their ac­tive lifestyles."If, by the way, it al­so "helps to re­lieve con­sti­pa­tion and gas pains, soothes in­flam­ma­tion of the stom­ach, aids di­ges­tion, im­proves ap­petite and helps your blood get rid of the tox­ic sub­stances," all claims made with­out ev­i­dence of any sort apart, from rumshop talk, so much the bet­ter. Can't hurt, can it?

Still oth­ers, a bit more mod­ern, sug­gest­ed Ja­maican sar­sa­par­il­la (since Bolt and the cas­sa­va talk, any herb with a Ja­maican name is fair game), Amer­i­can gin­seng (Chi­nee, you know) or that well-used stand­by, saw pal­met­to.All be­cause a cou­ple of peo­ple did some sperm counts in an in­fer­til­i­ty clin­ic.An in­fer­til­i­ty clin­ic, peo­ple; that's where men and women go when they can't have ba­bies, and one of the main caus­es is a low sperm count. So why is every­body sur­prised that a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of men pre­sent­ing at such a clin­ic have a low sperm count?

My col­league and fel­low ca­lyp­so ad­mir­er Dr Lall Sawh is quite cor­rect to ques­tion the sta­tis­tics and to point out that men at­tend­ing an in­fer­til­i­ty clin­ic are a self-se­lect­ed group who are hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ties with sperm pro­duc­tion or qual­i­ty, not im­po­tence, and there­fore are not "rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the true state of all Trinidad men."I sup­pose it's be­cause we have a habit of hid­ing our head in the sand and re­fus­ing to deal with the re­al prob­lems in front of us and be­cause, of course, sex is a juicy top­ic, every­one con­sid­ers them­selves an ex­pert.

Car­ni­val just over so we wait­ing to see if the birth rate goes up in the next sev­en to nine months (ba­bies con­ceived un­der liquor tend to be born pre­ma­ture­ly).

But if it is true that Tri­ni men shoot­ing blanks, maybe we could im­port some Grena­di­ans or Guyanese?That might cause race talk so, if we want to be sci­en­tif­ic, we could go to the World Bank data­base and check out which coun­tries have the high­est birth rates (num­ber of live births oc­cur­ring dur­ing the year per 1,000 pop­u­la­tion) in the last year or so and ask them to send us some of their men and women.

Turns out that the top six coun­tries are Niger (48), Mali and Zam­bia tied for sec­ond (46), Ugan­da (45) and Chad and Malawi (44 each) so that does not change the pic­ture. Grena­da and Guyana must be hav­ing trou­ble, too, be­cause their birth rates are 19 and 18 re­spec­tive­ly.We not even close. Our birth rate is 15 live births per 1,000 pop­u­la­tion per year.

In­ter­est­ing­ly, at the same time that all the non­sense about "blanks" was be­ing blab­bered over the air­waves, WHO re­leased a long-await­ed re­port link­ing hor­mone-mim­ic­k­ing chem­i­cals to hu­man health prob­lems. Things have reached the point where WHO thinks the prob­lem has be­come a "glob­al threat," not as ex­cit­ing as a "ter­ror­ist threat" or a "code or­ange" by Fox TV, but in­ter­est­ing nev­er­the­less.

A pan­el of 16 sci­en­tists from ten na­tions in North Amer­i­ca, Eu­rope, Africa and Asia found that en­docrine-re­lat­ed dis­eases and dis­or­ders are on the rise. There is now emerg­ing ev­i­dence for ad­verse re­pro­duc­tive out­comes and mount­ing ev­i­dence for ef­fects on thy­roids, brains and me­tab­o­lism. Such dis­eases in­clude male re­pro­duc­tive prob­lems, preg­nan­cy com­pli­ca­tions, cer­tain can­cers, obe­si­ty and brain de­vel­op­ment.Many fac­tors can cause these dis­eases, but the re­port con­cludes that giv­en how fast some of these are ris­ing, en­vi­ron­men­tal chem­i­cals are like­ly play­ing a role. These chem­i­cals are the so-called en­docrine-dis­rup­tors be­cause they mim­ic the ac­tions of the en­docrine (or hor­mone sys­tem) in an­i­mals, in­clud­ing hu­mans.

Any sys­tem in the body con­trolled by hor­mones can be de­railed by hor­mone dis­rup­tors. Specif­i­cal­ly, they are known to be as­so­ci­at­ed with can­cers that are hor­mone de­pen­dent, like breast can­cer in women and prostate can­cer in men and with sex­u­al de­vel­op­ment prob­lems such as the mas­culin­i­sa­tion of fe­males or the fem­i­nis­ing of males.One such ef­fect, of course, would be a de­creased sperm count, now be­ing seen in in­creas­ing num­bers all over the world.One of the prob­lems with en­docrine-dis­rupt­ing chem­i­cals is the vast num­ber of them–about 800 are known–and how com­mon they are. They're all over the place, in such com­mon things as plas­tics (in­clud­ing ba­by bot­tles, paci­fiers and vinyl cur­tains), cans, house­hold clean­ing agents (laun­dry de­ter­gent, bar soap, sham­poo, con­di­tion­er, tooth­paste etc), house dust and pes­ti­cides.

Their ef­fects are par­tic­u­lar­ly no­tice­able on foe­tus­es, ba­bies and small chil­dren who are the most vul­ner­a­ble to hor­mone-al­ter­ing chem­i­cals be­cause their bod­ies are still de­vel­op­ing.

Could that be the re­al prob­lem?