A group of researchers at Medical University of Graz, Austria and Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada invite you to consider cell phones and semen.
You may be dubious about claims that cell phones cause cancer and various other ills. In that you would be in broad company — nearly all of the scientists who carefully looked for such links found little, if any persuasive evidence. But other people are convinced that cell phones spell medical doom.
Now comes the Graz/Queen’s team, with a chain of arguments so provocative, so exciting, that we can all join the authors in leaping to their conclusion. Their study is:
“Impact of Cell Phone Use on Men’s Semen Parameters,” Thomas Gutschi, Badereddin Mohamad Al-Ali, Rany Shamloul, Karl Pummer and Harald Trummer, Andrologia, vol. 43, 2011, pp. 312–6. The authors, at Medical University of Graz, Austria and Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, explain:
We speculate that mobile phones negatively affect sperm quality in men and may impair male fertility…. We speculate that frequent callers, compared with those who do not use cell phones, are exposed to more stress, which possibly could negatively affect semen quality and impair male fertility.
(Thanks to Ig Nobel Prize winner Richard Wassersug for bringing this to our attention.)
NOTE: The photo displayed here, showing a man using a non-cell telephone, has no direct connection to the subject of the study. Therefore it is possible that an important connection exists, and that the study will hasten the discovery of that connection.