Quote:
Originally Posted by SAINT_X
My wife and I have researched this as well, and as a result have gotten almost completely away from plastic containers...
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Good, you'll be better off. Have you investigated the eugenics aspect of this?
Here's something for you:
The Disappearing Male: Fact Sheet - Doc Zone | CBC-TV
Factsheet: Male Infertility
There are more than 20 heavily industrialized nations where the birth of baby boys has declined every year for the past 30 years - amounting to 3 million fewer baby boys.
The number of boys born with penis abnormalities and genital defects has increased by 200% in the past two decades.
Boys have a higher incidence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, learning disabilities, Tourett's syndrome, cerebral palsy and dyslexia.
Boys are four times as likely to be autistic.
The average sperm count of a North American college student today is less than half of what it was 50 years ago.
The quality of sperm is declining. Eighty-five per cent of the sperm produced by a healthy male is DNA-damaged.
Damaged sperm have been linked to a 300% increase in testicular cancer - a form of cancer that affects young men in their 20s and 30s.
The chemical industry has developed more than 90,000 man-made chemicals in the last sixty years. Eighty-five percent of them have never undergone testing for their impact on the human body.
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Though it's rather on the innocuous side, this is interesting as well:
Future Shock (1970) by Alvin Toffler, excerpt:
Years ago, Dr. Hans Selye, a pioneer investigator of the body's adaptive responses, reported that "animals in which intense and prolonged stress is produced by any means suffer from sexual derangements ... Clinical studies have confirmed the fact that people exposed to stress react very much like experimental animals in all these respects. In women the monthly
cycles become irregular or stop altogether, and during lactation milk secretion may become insufficient for the baby. In men both the sexual urge and sperm-cell formation are diminished."
Since then population experts and ecologists have compiled impressive evidence that heavily stressed populations of rats, deer—and people—show lower fertility levels than less stressed control groups. Crowding, for example, a condition that involves a constant high level of interpersonal interaction and compels the individual to make extremely frequent
adaptive reactions has been shown, at least in animals, to enlarge the adrenals and cause a noticeable drop in fertility.
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Here's where we should start to be worried and wonder who knew about the effects of these chemicals and when, some people certainly knew in advance:
The Next Million Years by Charles Galton Darwin (1953), excerpt:
Another type of discovery may be connected with hormones, those internal chemical secretions which so largely regulate the operations of the human body.
The artificial use of hormones has already been shown to have profound effects on the behaviour of animals, and it seems quite possible that hormones, or perhaps drugs, might have similar effects on man. For example, there might be a drug, which, without other harmful effects, removed the urgency of sexual desire, and so reproduced in humanity the status of workers in a beehive.
Looking a little deeper there is the possibility of substantially altering the intellectual and moral natures of individuals by some sort of
hormonal injections; already great effects have been produced in animals. Finally, as the most curious speculation of all, it is not quite impossible that it may one day be feasible to
select in advance the sex of each child that is to be born. Whether the decision is made by the parents, or by their rulers, this suggests that probability of a great unbalance in the populations of the world.
It is clear from all this that the world policy would need to be supported by international sanctions, and the only ultimate sanction must be war. Present methods of warfare would not be nearly murderous enough to reduce populations seriously, and even so they would take a nearly equal toll of victims from the unoffending nations. So after the war the question would arise of how to reduce the excess population of the offending nation. It is not possible to be humane in this,
but the most humane method would seem to be infanticide together with the sterilization of a fraction of the adult population. Such sterilization could now be done without the brutal methods practised in the past, but it would certainly be vehemently resisted."
Another possible, though rather remoter, discovery suggests the most curious consequences; this is the control of the relative numbers of the two sexes. It is known that the sex of a child is carried by the sperm, not the ovum, and it is at least imaginable that some method could be found for sorting out those of the sperm cells which carry the male of the female character.
It would thus become possible to regulate how many men or women there should be in a population. If such a practice could be developed it is sure that for a time there would be a great unabalance in populations.
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Now pay close attention to the following article...