Can Your Cellphone Cook Your Sperm?

Another week, another cautionary headline about how technology is destroying our health. The most recent angst-inducing claims involve cellphones and how they can “cook” men's sperm.

The latest study was undertaken by a team of reproductive endocrinologists at Technion University in Haifa, Israel. The scientists reported that sperm levels of men who kept mobile phones close to their person were significantly affected by latent radiation.

The study was greeted with eager and breathless link-backs by the tabloid Internet media, but with some skepticism and markedly less enthusiasm by the medical and scientific peerage. The notion that cellphone radiation adversely impacts sperm motility has been kicked around for a while, and is often fiercely debated in the scientific community just as long.

The recent Technion study was almost immediately met with dissenting views voiced in the UK's Telegraph by Dr. Fiona Matthews, who is a biologist at the University of Exeter there. She has done similar research with mobile phone radiation and upholds that there is insufficient evidence to support claims cellphones can make us infertile.

She acknowledges that there are “consistent patterns of mobile phone exposure being linked to reduced sperm quality,” but denies there is any evidence or consensus that mobile phone use can in any way lead to complete infertility.

The whole process is aggravated by a number of variables, not least of which being the widely differing levels of radiation output by various models of phones.

Make no mistake: sperm cells are fragile, and particularly susceptible to damage due to their inability to repair themselves, unlike normal cells.

But many of the skeptics feel that cellphones are being scapegoated. As people wait longer in life to have children, their likelihood of having children “before it is too late” diminishes. Also, excessive alcohol consumption, smoking and being overweight rank much higher on the causality list than cellphone radiation. Blaming his iPhone on his inability to conceive a child may just be someone's convenient excuse for otherwise bad lifestyle choices.

Experts do not deny that there are many modern contrivances which are working to emasculate us, they just don't place cell phones very high up on the list.

Experts at the fertility unit at Cambridge University Hospitals in the UK point towards “estrogen-mimicking” compounds that have entered the food chain. These compounds are found in some pesticides and plastic food wrappings, and can have a negative impact on male fertility. These are tough to avoid, but so is cellphone radiation, and you are more likely to improve your chances of conceiving successfully by eating an organic diet than you are by keeping a smartphone at arm's length.