EMFs and infertility report

[Guest guest]

From the microwavenews.com

July 3… Exposures to ambient magnetic fields may affect the quality

of human sperm and may well explain its well-documented decline over

the last few decades. De-Kun Li, an epidemiologist at Kaiser

Permanente in Oakland, CA, has found that daily exposures of only

1.6mG or higher for at least two-and-a-half hours were associated

with significantly poorer semen quality. Men who were exposed to over

1.6mG for over six hours a day were four times more likely to have

substandard sperm.

" The longer you are exposed, the higher the risk, " Li told Microwave

News. He presented these new findings last week at the annual meeting

of the Society for Epidemiologic Research, held in Chicago. He has

submitted them for publication.

" If it holds up, this would be very important because magnetic field

exposures are ubiquitous, " Li said. " We know that sperm quality has

been going down for a long time with the largest declines in urban

areas. That would be consistent with EMF exposures which are highest

in cities. "

The quality of the semen was assessed according to WHO criteria for

motility and morphology —that is, the ability of sperm to " swim " (to

the egg) and their shape. " Sperm quality could turn out to be a

sensitive endpoint to study the biological effects of EMFs, " Li said.

Li is one of the few to explore new ways of defining what is a

biologically significant dose of EMFs. An important implication of

his new study is that while he might classify a man as being in

a " high " exposure group, that same man could still have a time-

weighted, 24-hour average exposure of less than 1mG, which would put

him in the " unexposed " group in most past studies. Such a

misclassification would reduce the chances of seeing this effect.

In a study published in 2002, Li showed that women exposed above a

certain threshold (16mG) had higher rates of miscarriages (see MWN,

J/F02, p.1). At the time, many considered that this new concept of

EMF dose was worth pursuing. But, in fact, no one did —at least no

one has yet published a follow-up study. " In that earlier study we

saw higher miscarriage risks among women who had an exposure of more

than 16mG at least once a day, " Li said, " in our new study, men had

poorer sperm quality if they were exposed to a much lower field but

it had to be for at least 10% of the day. "

The power-frequency fields implicated in this new study are extremely

weak. They are approximately 1,000 times lower than the current

ICNIRP guidelines and some three times lower than what many see as

the threshold for increasing the risk of childhood leukemia (3-4mG).

According to a large-scale survey carried out a decade ago, close to

15% of the U.S. population is exposed to an average of more than 2mG

over a 24-hour period (see MWN, M/J98, p.4).