In the summer of 2007, a research team in Skåne and Denmark published a study on sperm. This had been conducted on 680 men in four countries – Sweden, Greenland, Ukraine and Poland. It showed that 20% of the men had a special gene variant which made them particularly sensitive to certain environmental contaminants. Their sperm production was reduced by 40% if they were exposed to PCB and dioxins.
Researcher colleagues from the Occupational and Environmental Medicine Clinic in Lund stated in the same study that high exposure to PCB reduces sperm motility and increases the proportion of sperm with chromosomal damage. Men are chiefly exposed to these contaminants via the food they eat. They are stored in the body and it takes a long time, several years, before they are degraded.
General warning is desirable
The Swedish men got the contaminants via fish from the Baltic Sea, those on Greenland from seals and whales, while Ukrainians received the contaminants from agricultural products. In Poland, men had a relatively low content of these environmental contaminants.
The research team was led by Yvonne Lundberg Giwercman who is Assistant Professor at the Malmö/Lund University Hospital. She and her team have now repeated the experiment in the laboratory and got the same results as those given by the previous epidemiological studies. This underlines that those who will father a child should be careful about eating salmon and other fatty fish from the Baltic. Yvonne Lundberg Giwercman wishes that the Swedish Food Administration would consider issuing a general warning to men also, but the Administration wants to wait until more research teams have presented the same results.