Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

"We are certain of the following: A large number of manmade chemicals have been released into the environment... [which] have the potential to disrupt the endocrine systems of animals, including humans."
Wingspread Conference,
Report on Chemically Induced Alterations
in Sexual and Functional development:
The Wildlife/Human Connection.

The organic structures that nature has found so useful in hormones - especially estrogen - have also proven highly useful in the chemical alchemy of the industrial revolution. Some manmade chemicals can effect the endocrine systems of animals causing changes in the animal's hormone balance. Perhaps most alarming of these chemical insults to the environment are the effects of estrogenics on the males of many species. We're now learning with great reluctance that many manmade chemicals are estrogenic, mimicking and compromising the effects of natural estrogen.

Estrogens interact with larger molecules through specialized sockets called receptors. Estrogens fit in receptors and thereby turn on the biological effects of that receptor. Xeno-biotic estrogenic chemicals can take the place of the normal hormone in turning on receptors, block receptors by fitting in the wrong way and keeping normal estrogen from turning on the receptor, turn on more receptors than normal increasing the effects of any natural estrogen present, and can even effect the metabolism of normal estrogen, resulting in turning it into other forms that can have an indirect effect on the hormone system.

Some of the known estrogenics we've already turned loose in the environment are the pesticides DDT, DDE, kelthane, heptachlor, kepone and methoxychlor, the pharmaceutical DES, and industrial PCB's and phenols. Nonylphenols commonly used in such varied products as plastics, detergents, and spermicidal foams have been shown to be estrogenic. Estrogenic chemicals have also been found in many municipal water supplies. The chemicals persist in the environment and bond easily to lipids. As such these chemicals concentrate in the fatty tissues of animals and can have effects long after initial exposure.

Males of species as varied as alligators, birds, and humans are under increasing chemical assault around the world. Perhaps the most powerful and alarming evidence of the effects of estrogenics comes from a lake in Florida contaminated by a kelthane spill a decade ago. Kelthane breaks down into DDE, an estrogenic compound. The lake is now environmentally "clean", but as many as 90% of the male alligators and turtles have substantial problems in their reproductive systems severe enough to make them sterile and/or physically unable to mate.

While investigators have been chasing alligators in Florida, others in Europe have been looking at the effects on humans. Scientists in Copenhagen have identified a 50% drop in sperm counts in humans over the last 50 years. And at the same time sperm counts and semen volumes are dropping, the percentage of abnormal sperm in seemingly normal men is increasing.

Some of the most direct and well documented effects of estrogenics are on sertoli cells. Sertoli cells control the development of male sex organs. Hormones effect the proper functioning of sertoli cells, and estrogen exposure in particular has been shown to cause malfunctions in sertoli cells in the laboratory. Malfunctions in sertoli cells are thought to provide the mechanism causing the increasing rates of genital deformities and abnormal male development appearing in a wide variety of species.

While the effects of hormone imbalance are most profound during the formative years before puberty, adverse effects can occur in later years as well. Malfunctions in the sertoli cells are thought to be involved with cancer of the testes and prostrate. In some species, if the male hormone mix is not maintained throughout life, the sex of adult animals may actually change. While physical defects are most obvious, estrogenic exposure early in life has been shown to cause abnormal male behavior patterns and orientations in laboratory animals.

It's still unknown which chemicals or mix of chemicals are having the greatest effect, or whether we're being exposed through the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the food we eat. Since potentially estrogenic chemicals have proven so useful in our modern industrial world, there is significant resistance to looking at their dark side. All that is clear is that something is causing estrogenic effects in the males of most if not all animal species. Society would be well advised to put aside its current obsessive male bashing long enough to solve this problem before there are no more males to bash...