Sperm count drop is accelerating worldwide and threatens the future of mankind, study warns

Sperm counts worldwide have halved over the past five decades, and the pace of the decline has more than doubled since the turn of the century, new research shows.

The international team behind it says the data is alarming and points to a fertility crisis threatening the survival of humanity.

Their meta-analysis looked at 223 studies based on sperm samples from over 57,000 men across 53 countries.

It shows for the first time that men in Latin America, Asia, and Africa share a similar decline in total sperm counts and concentration as previously observed in Europe, North America, and Australia.

The authors warn that the mean sperm count has now dropped dangerously close to the threshold that makes conception more difficult, meaning couples around the world may encounter problems having a baby without medical assistance.

The findings, published on Tuesday in the journal Human Reproduction Update, serve as "a canary in a coal mine," said Professor Hagai Levine, the study’s lead author from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Hadassah Braun School of Public Health.

"We have a serious problem on our hands that, if not mitigated, could threaten mankind’s survival," he said in a statement.

As part of a team also featuring Professor Shanna Swan at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York, along with researchers in Denmark, Brazil, Spain, Israel, and the USA, Levine studied sperm count trends in regions that had not been reviewed previously.

That same team had already reported in 2017 an alarming decline in sperm counts across the Western world.

In this latest study, they found that average sperm counts all around the world had fallen by over 50 per cent over the past five decades.

Data from 1973 to 2018 showed sperm counts dropped on