Humans are polluted with hundreds of different industrial chemicals. Even babies are born polluted, as EWG's studies show. So, the new documentary "The Disappearing Male" should come as no surprise to the ones familiar with the topic. It will be a good resource for the ones that are not.
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the makers of the film:
"The Disappearing Male is about one of the most important, and least publicized, issues facing the human species: the toxic threat to the male reproductive system.
The last few decades have seen steady and dramatic increases in the incidence of boys and young men suffering from genital deformities, low sperm count, sperm abnormalities and testicular cancer. At the same time, boys are now far more at risk of suffering from ADHD, autism, Tourette's syndrome, cerebral palsy, and dyslexia.
The Disappearing Male takes a close and disturbing look at what many doctors and researchers now suspect are responsible for many of these problems: a class of common chemicals that are ubiquitous in our world.
Found in everything from shampoo, sunglasses, meat and dairy products, carpet, cosmetics and baby bottles, they are called "hormone mimicking" or "endocrine disrupting" chemicals and they may be starting to damage the most basic building blocks of human development."
Even though the film is new, the news is not. The 2007 study from the University of Pittsburgh has found that during the past thirty years, the number of male births has steadily decreased in the U.S. and Japan. The study found a decline of 17 males per 10,000 births in the U.S. and a decline of 37 males per 10,000 births in Japan.
With many of the issues that EWG works on, it is hard to pin point and say that exposure to one chemical over X years will lead to Y. But, what we can do, is look at the chemical exposure trough the global health trends and draw conclusions from there. The conclusions are very concerning, to say the least.