“Truth is stranger than fiction” is a well-worn cliche. In the case of the research findings of Dr. Shanna Swan, truth may be scarier than fiction. With data that seems to mirror the fiction of author Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” author Swan and her team of researchers completed a major study and found that over the past four decades, sperm levels among men in Western countries have dropped by more than 50%. They came to this conclusion after examining 185 studies involving close to 45,000 healthy men. The result sent shockwaves around the globe—but the story didn’t end there. It turns out sexual development is changing in broader ways, for both men and women and even other species and that the modern world is on pace to become an infertile one.
How and why could this happen? What is hijacking our fertility and our health? Swan joins Vail Symposium to discuss Swan’s book “Count Down” to address these questions. Swan will share what she and other researchers have learned about how both lifestyle and chemical exposures are affecting our fertility, sexual development and general health as a species.
