Study - 20% Of Sperm Donors In Hunan Met Standards In 2015; In 2001, 50% Did
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Last year fewer than a fifth of young men who donated sperm in the inland province of Hunan had sufficiently healthy semen to qualify as a donor, according to a 15-year study of more than 30,000 applicants. In 2001 more than half qualified.
Local media reports indicate Hunan is not the only province suffering a shortage in qualified donors. State broadcaster China Radio International recently reported that a sperm bank in Henan province had dropped minimum height and education requirements for donors and was offering to store their semen free of charge for three decades in an effort to make up its own deficit.
“Growing evidence seems to suggest that male infertility is increasingly becoming a serious concern in the entire country,” said Huang Yanzhong, senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. If shown to reflect a broader trend, such findings would further complicate China’s mounting demographic problems.
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The researchers in the Hunan semen study, published online in the journal Fertility and Sterility, say there is no clear explanation for why donors’ reproductive health declined so rapidly. But they point to “increased environmental pollution, including pollution of water, air and food”, as a possible explanation. However, World Health Organisation spokesperson Tarik Jašarević said the WHO could not yet determine with certainty which factors had caused deterioration in certain or multiple countries, as studies often employed different methodologies to analyse semen. He also cautioned that semen quality did not necessarily correlate directly with male fertility.
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https://www.ft.com/content/d4b5325c-abad-11e6-ba7d-76378e4fef24