Men told to get a wriggle on and end the sperm drought
Louise Hall Health Reporter
December 30, 2007
INFERTILE couples desperate to have children are facing agonising waits for donated sperm. The Royal Hospital for Women has had no new sperm donors for more than 12 months.
Reproductive specialists say attracting enough men to satisfy demand has always been difficult, and waiting lists are longer because of the growing number of childhood cancer survivors rendered infertile by treatment. The dwindling stocks are also sought by single women and same-sex couples.
The director of the hospital’s department of reproductive medicine, Stephen Steigrad, said at least 20 men who had undergone aggressive cancer treatments requested donor insemination for their partners every year. Without new donors, the service would have to be stopped within six months.
The Centre for Cancer and Blood Disorders at Sydney Children’s Hospital at Randwick says one in 900 Australians aged between 16 and 45 has survived childhood cancer.
Changes to NSW legislation this month requiring donors to register their names on a mandatory central register had turned potential donors off, said Professor Michael Chapman, from IVF Australia, which has a waiting list of two years.
The Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill guarantees children access to their father’s name, date of birth, education and medical information once they turn 18. It may also require details of the donor’s partner and other children to be listed.
“Previously men could donate knowing there was no way they were going to get a knock on their door,” Professor Chapman said. “Now men are less likely to donate.”
Dr Anne Clark, from Fertility First Hurstville, said the sperm shortage would be compounded by the new laws, which legislate that one man’s sperm can go to only five families, down from 10.
Men told to get a wriggle on and end the sperm drought - National - Home
ONE OF THE MOST SICK STORY that i ever read!!
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Father, daughter have child together
Article from: AAP
Print April 06, 2008 09:28pm
A SOUTH Australian father and daughter have revealed they are a couple, and have had a child together.
John and Jenny Deaves reunited 30 years after Mr Deaves separated from Jenny’s mother.
Jenny was 31 and just two weeks after meeting, father and daughter had sex.
“John and I are in this relationship as consenting adults,” Mrs Deaves told the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes tonight.
“We are just asking for a little bit of respect and understanding.”
Their nine-month-old daughter Celeste, shown on TV, appears fit and healthy.
Mrs Deaves said soon after reuniting with her father she began to see him as a man first and her father second.
“I was looking at him, sort of going, oh, he’s not too bad,” she said.
“Like you might look at a man across the bar at a nightclub.”
Mrs Deaves brought two children, Samantha and Alex, into the relationship after splitting from her former partner.
Mr Deaves admitted that he “initially” thought having sex with his daughter was wrong.
“Emotions take over, as people no doubt realise, there are times during your life where emotions do rule the heart, it rules the head,” he said.
“I knew it was illegal, of course I knew it was illegal but you know, so what.”
Mrs Deaves said the physical relationship with her father was like “a sexual relationship with any other man”.
For Mr Deaves the sexual relationship was “absolutely fantastic”.
A South Australian police media spokesman said “the couple is being monitored”.
Dad-daughter couple had earlier child
April 07, 2008
A FATHER and daughter who have revealed they are couple and have a child together had another baby who died a few days after birth from a congenital heart disease, court documents show.
South Australian couple John and Jenny Deaves with their daughter, John Earnest Deaves and his daughter Jennifer Anne Deaves are at the centre of an incest scandal in South Australia over their seven-year relationship.
The pair revealed their relationship on Channel 9’s 60 Minutes program last night, saying they were just asking for some respect and understanding.
In March this year, they were placed on three-year good behaviour bonds after
pleading guilty to two counts of incest
.
District Court sentencing judge Steven Millsteed said the first count of
incest
was based on an act of sexual intercourse which resulted in the birth of the couple’s first child.
The second count of
incest
related to an act of sexual intercourse which resulted in the birth of their second child in May last year.
“The first child was born in 2001 but died a few days after birth due to a congenital heart disease,” Judge Millsteed said.
The couple had started a relationship together after being reunited in 2000, almost 30 years after Mr Deaves separated from Jenny’s mother.
Because of problems with her own marriage, Ms Deaves had gone to live with her father at Yongala, in South Australia.
Their physical relationship developed later that year and both ended their marriages and began living together.
But that has been challenged by Mr Deaves’ ex-wife who has rubbished claims he had not seen his daughter for 30 years.
Mr Deaves’ ex-wife Dorothy, 69, who he married long after splitting with Jenny’s mother, told ninemsn that when she married John Deaves in 1984, the then 15-year-old Jenny stayed with them for a week.
“It was hard to face for a long time,” Mrs Deaves said. “It’s one of those things everyone’s so upset about.”
Jenny stayed with them four times before their marriage broke down in 2000 after the father and daughter took a trip to Dubbo together, she said.
“Each of you say that the other has provided care and affection that was missing in your marriage,” Judge Millsteed said earlier.
“You also say that although you are father and daughter, that you were virtually strangers when your relationship commenced and that the relationship was based on mutual love and respect.”
The couple had their first child while living in Rockhampton, Queensland, before moving to Port Pirie, in South Australia.
After the birth of their second child they moved to Bordertown, near the Victorian border where the Department of Families and Communities became aware of their relationship and turned the matter over to police.
Judge Millsteed said that when contacted by police the Deaves made full admissions.
He said both Jenny and John Deaves told him that they accepted their sexual relationship must end but hoped they would be able to continue to support one another and the children.
But he said while the case was not typical he had to impose a sentence that impressed upon them that any resumption of their incestuous relationship was unacceptable.
“The offence of incest exists not merely to protect children from sexual abuse,” Judge Millsteed said.
“In my view, other relevant factors include the need to prevent the high risk of congenital defects in children born of incestuous relationships and to prevent children suffering psychological harm and social stigmatisation.”
Revealing their relationship on Nine last night, the Deaves said they were just asking for some respect and understanding.
Mr Deaves admitted that he “initially” thought having sex with his daughter was wrong.
“Emotions take over, as people no doubt realise. There are times during your life where emotions do rule the heart, it rules the head,” he said.
“I knew it was illegal. Of course, I knew it was illegal but you know, so what.”
- Agencies
Dad-daughter couple had earlier child | The Australian
Woman becomes a mum at 64
December 3, 2007 - 10:13AM
MUNICH - A German woman aged 64 has given birth to a healthy baby girl, a national record and her first child after years of unfruitful attempts and false pregnancies, a report said today.
“Mother and child are doing well,” said doctor Elias Karam at the Aschaffenburg clinic in southern Bavaria, quoted by the internet site of the Der Spiegel weekly.
The baby was born on Thursday by caesarian section and weighed two kilograms, the report said.
While the woman became the oldest German to given birth, it was far from a world record.
At the end of 2006, a Spanish woman of 67 gave birth to twins, pipping the record made the year before by another twin-bearer, this time a 66-year-old Romanian.
The German birth came thanks to the donation of ovules by a 25-year-old donor but used the sperm of her husband, who is also aged 64, Spiegel Online reported.
The ovule operation happened abroad because it is banned in Germany, the report said.
“This woman came to me because she needed my help. As a doctor, I gave it without question,” said Karam.
AFP
Woman becomes a mum at 64 - World - BrisbaneTimes - brisbanetimes.com.au
Case of the disappearing dads
April 10, 2008
It might be a man’s world, but could his reproductive days be in decline?
Exposures to pesticides, herbicides, industrial agents, tobacco, alcohol and metals - even mobile phone use - are being increasingly blamed for abnormal sperm and falls in sperm counts.
Australian and overseas biologists have long argued the male testis, DNA and sperm are under attack from environmental contaminants, and the end game could be the male sex-defining Y chromosome’s destruction.
Counsellors trying to help couples conceive have been desperate to give would-be fathers more precise advice on chemicals to avoid and lifestyles to lead - but are now learning that in some cases the damage to men’s fertility may have happened way back in their mother’s womb.
The discovery has been made in the new science known as “epigenetics”, which strongly suggests chemical damage is causing abnormal sperm and male infertility via a pregnant woman’s exposure to contaminants, passing infertility not only to her son but successive sons - overturning old assumptions about biology and DNA.
Until recently, it had been assumed a gene had to be mutated for a disease to be inherited. But studies on pregnant rats exposed to pesticides show male offspring can inherit reproductive disorders, and pass them on to their children and grandchildren, through an abnormality that affects the activity of genes but leaves the sequence of the DNA code unchanged.
Long-held fears of declining sperm numbers in Western countries are just one part of the problem for men’s reproductive prospects. In 1992, a meta-analysis, published in the British Medical Journal, of the world literature reported that between 1938 and 1990 there was a halving of sperm concentration in human semen. A review by researchers in the United States in Environmental Health Perspectives in 1997 reanalysing the data over the same period suggested a 3 per cent per year decline in Australia and Europe - twice that of US - on limited Australian data.
But the claims of falling sperm were dismissed as “extravagant” by a Sydney researcher, Professor David Handelsman of the ANZAC Institute. In a 2001 paper published in the journal Reproduction, Fertility And Development he criticised the way disparate studies had been aggregated, and the US researchers toned down earlier estimates. Yet Handelsman conceded some cancer registry data indicated a gradual rise in testicular cancer, which he could not explain.
Male infertility is a common problem. A 2005 Andrology Australia national survey of
5990 men aged 40 and over found almost 8 per cent had tried and been unable to have children. This was “the first real estimate of infertility prevalence in Australia”, the authors suggested, but it was unclear which partner was infertile, and no historical Australian comparison exists. Thirty-four per cent of the 40-plus men who had no children still wanted to be fathers.
Among Western couples, roughly one in seven seek treatment for infertility, at least half due to a male problem, and one in 35 babies is now born with assisted conception.
In Australia and New Zealand in 2005, there were 21,420 assisted reproduction technology cycles in which an oocyte or embryo was transferred which involved ICSI - intracytoplasmic sperm injection. This involves a single sperm being injected into an egg for fertilisation outside the body and replaced in the uterus, usually because the male has a low sperm count, it is abnormal or has poor motility. In recent years, ICSI has outnumbered in-vitro fertilisation involving an oocyte or embryo transfer. In 2005, it outnumbered by nearly 4500 IVF transfer cycles.
The adverse influence of “xenobiotics” - molecules foreign to biological systems - on male fertility was first recognised in the 1970s, when male workers who had been directly exposed to an agricultural pesticide, 1,2-dibromo-3-chloropropane, suffered severe disruption of sperm development, says Professor John Aitken, the director of the Centre of Excellence in Biotechnology and Development at Newcastle University.
More recently, genital abnormalities have been found in male alligators in Florida swamplands where the poisonous chemical DDT has been tipped. In Ontario, male mice breathing unfiltered air on a highway downwind from two steel mills developed
60 more DNA mutations than mice that breathed filtered air - a pointer, some scientists believe, to the potential environmental impact of heavy industry on men’s fertility.
Mobile phone use is also implicated. A preliminary study of 361 men published in January in the journal Fertility And Sterility found the more hours men spent on a mobile phone, the lower their sperm count and the greater their percentage of abnormal sperm. However, researchers were quick to point out they had found only an association, not proven cause and effect.
Aitken says sperm is vulnerable to attack from contaminants both within male germ cells in the mature testis, which make the sperm, and after it has been released into the female reproductive tract because it lacks a protective coating.
The science is inexact, but the nature of damage to the male germ line - complete deletions of sections of the Y chromosome which cause “5 to 15 per cent” of severe male infertility, as well as oxidative stress - suggest they are the result of “spontaneous DNA damage” by environmental factors, Aitken says.
Naturally, age may simply weary sperm quality and numbers, given men do have a biological clock. It is not a uniformly sharp decline in natural fertility, but a decline in tissues, nonetheless. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, published a study in 2003 of 97 healthy, non-smoking men from which they concluded sperm motility (movement) declines with age. The chance of sperm motility being clinically abnormal was 60 per cent by age 40, and 85 per cent by age 60.
Aitken says that DNA damage in sperm cells increases with age and exposure to environmental contamination such as exhaust fumes. “That has an impact not so much on a man’s ability to produce sperm, but to produce normal sperm,” he says. “So to give a classic example, if you’re a man and you smoke heavily, it doesn’t have a dramatic impact on your fertility, but it induces DNA damage in your germ line, and your children have a five-fold increase chance of developing cancer.”
In Australia there are concerns with detergents such as nonylphenol, which is used in some household and industrial cleaning products - “but we have no idea what impact it has on male DNA quality” - as well as microwave radiation from mobile phones. Preliminary data suggests eating unsaturated fats - as opposed to saturated fats, which are bad for the heart - causes problems in male DNA germ lines, Aitken says.
Separately, Aitken and colleagues also suggested in detail in another paper in Nature back in 2004 that pregnant women exposed to xenobiotics passed on testicular dysgenesis syndrome, which has features including poor semen quality and testicular cancer, to their male offspring.
How this happens is also very uncertain. But epigenetic modification - in which small chemical tags are attached to the DNA, altering the activity of nearby genes - may hold fresh though sobering answers.
In 2004, Monash Institute of Medical Research scientists in Melbourne knocked out a gene that was an epigenetic regulator in breeding mice. “The mice were born, they looked fine, but the males were all infertile,” recalls researcher Moira O’Bryan. “That wasn’t what we were expecting.”
Epigenetics “controls how tightly your DNA is packed”, O’Bryan explains. “Imagine that genes are like the hardware in a computer. Epigenetics is like the software. If you muck up either, you’ll get infertility. It can be affected by things like diet and lifestyle, but its only become clear in the last couple of years it can be affected by what your parents did, and what your grandparents did. The frightening thing is some environmental pollutants seem to affect epigenetic regulation.”
At Washington State University, a team led by Michael Skinner reported in the journal Science in 2005 that female rats exposed to vinclozolin, a fungicide used in vineyards, and methoxychlor, a pesticide, produced males with low sperm counts - likewise the grandsons and great-grandsons.
In human studies published last December, scientists at the University of Southern California in the journal Public Library of Science One also suggested epigenetic changes trigger male infertility. They found sperm DNA from men with abnormal or low sperm levels had high levels of methylation, while normal sperm samples showed no methylation abnormalities. “Exposures to chemicals as a foetus may lead to adult diseases,” suggested author Rebecca Sokol.
Matthew Anway of the University of Idaho told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Boston in February that garden chemicals caused rats inheritable problems such as damaged and overgrown prostates, infertility and kidney problems, which were present up to four generations later. He, too, had pinpointed vinclozolin exposure as a cause of female rats producing infertile sons via epigenetic modification.
But the conference was reminded that fathers might also pass on health problems to their children, via the more traditionally understood mutation of the male germ line. Another scientist, Cynthia Daniels of Rutgers University in New York, warned both would-be parents to stay away from unnecessary chemicals, but made a point of addressing budding fathers: “If I was a young man I would not drink beer, I would not be smoking when I’m trying to conceive a child.”
Case of the disappearing dads - Health - Life & Style Home
It’s no hoax: man is pregnant
:
confused:
April 2, 2008 - 9:50AM
A transgender man who kept his female reproductive organs, despite his transformation, is now five months pregnant and will appear on Oprah Winfrey’s television show, the talk show said.
“I’m a person and I have the right to have my own biological child,” Thomas Beatie, of Bend, Oregon, said in excerpts from the show, which airs on Thursday.
Sceptics questioned whether the story was an April Fool’s hoax, but the Chicago-based talk show said Winfrey interviewed Beatie, his wife Nancy and their obstetrician, as well as with friends of the couple. Beatie also did an interview with People magazine.
Beatie, 34, and his wife recount how she was unable to conceive because of a hysterectomy, according to the excerpts.
“If Nancy could get pregnant, I wouldn’t be doing this,” Beatie said.
The Hawaii-born Beatie related his struggles with various doctors, family and friends in a letter published last week by The Advocate, a magazine for gays.
Beatie, who was formerly Tracy Lagondino, had chest reconstruction surgery and began taking testosterone, he wrote.
Upon deciding to have a child, he halted bimonthly hormone injections and resumed menstruating, then artificially inseminated himself with anonymous donor sperm from a sperm bank. A first attempt failed.
“When my brother found out about my loss, he said, ‘It’s a good thing that happened. Who knows what kind of monster it would have been?’ " Beatie recalled.
A second attempt was successful, and he expects to deliver a girl about July 3.
“Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire,” Beatie wrote.
Reuters
It’s no hoax: man is pregnant - World - BrisbaneTimes - brisbanetimes.com.au
No more happy finish
April 10, 2008 - 2:41PM
JAKARTA - Massage parlours in an Indonesian town are asking their
female masseuses to padlock their skirts and pants
to make it clear that sex is not on offer.
But the move has been opposed by the women’s affairs minister of Indonesia, where massage parlours are often a front for prostitution.
“It is not the right way to prevent promiscuity,” Meutia Swasono told today’s Jakarta Post. “It insults women … as if they are the ones in the wrong.”
At least one parlour in the tourist town of Batu on Java island has required its masseuses to padlock their skirts or trousers to make it clear it does not tolerate prostitution.
Others in the town started following suit after local officials suggested it was a good idea at a recent meeting with parlour owners.
TV footage and photos have shown several masseuses with small padlocks in the zip of their pants or skirts in recent days
.
“The padlocking phenomena has been seen at various parlours and it is something we like,” said Imam Suryono, the head of the town’s public order authority.
He denied media reports he formally ordered them to wear padlocks.
AP
No more happy finish - World - BrisbaneTimes - brisbanetimes.com.au
Women tell of embarrassment over ‘secret’ sex films
PerthNow; by Todd Cardy
April 10, 2008 07:07pm
THREE women have told of their embarrassment over being filmed, allegedly without their knowledge, having sex with a Tuart Hill man.
Christian Pinkerton, 29, today stood trial in the Perth Magistrates Court on charges that he created sex tapes using a hidden camera while not telling the women he was filming them.
Mr Pinkerton has pleaded not guilty to 29 counts of breaching the Surveillance Devices Act.
The court heard he taped himself having sex with the women in the lounge room of his Tuart Hill unit on separate occasions between June 2006 and January this year.
Mr Pinkerton’s lawyer, Curt Hofmann, conceded to the police prosecutor that his client did not deny filming the girls, but he argued that they knew they were in front of a camera.
He told the court Mr Pinkerton was a graphic designer who enjoyed making films of all types.
All three women denied suggestions by Mr Hofmann that they were too embarrassed to admit that they agreed to being filmed.
Each testified she did not see the camera, agree to being filmed or had ever agreed to being part of a sex tape before.
A 20-year-old student said she felt “very betrayed’’ after police told her about the tapes. “The whole thing is humiliating,’’ she told the court.
“I didn’t want any of my friends or family to know. It made me feel stupid.’’
Police prosecutor Senior Constable Paul Cook asked another woman who Mr Pinkerton had dated for about two years: “Were you aware that you were being filmed?” “No, not at all - positively not at all,’’ she replied.
Police seized 29 tapes found locked in a box of an alarmed room along with a fish-eye camera which was linked to a VCR.
A pink inflatable cushion sex toy - which was used in the taped activities - was also seized.
The court was told an investigation had been launched into Mr Pinkerton after one of the women found the tapes sprawled on the floor of the unit, with one still in the VCR.
One tape shown to the court shows Mr Pinkerton in his lounge room placing pillows and a towel on a couch, before a girl joins him. If found guilty, Mr Pinkerton faces a fine of $5000 or 12 months jail for each count.
The trial continues before Magistrate Paul Heaney.
Women tell of embarrassment over ‘secret’ sex films | PerthNow
Drunk driver was ‘sleep driving’
April 11, 2008
THE controversial sleeping pill
Stilnox
may have caused a Sydney man to drive involuntarily while he was still drunk, a judge has found in a landmark ruling which will raise further concern about the dangers of the medication.
Robert James Kingston was found not guilty yesterday of driving with a blood alcohol limit of 0.105 - twice the legal limit - after Judge Colin Phegan found on appeal there was a “real possibility” he was “sleep driving” after taking a Stilnox tablet.
The judge said further evidence had emerged on the effects of Stilnox - including increased government warnings about its side effects - since Mr Kingston was originally found guilty of drink driving by a local court.
Judge Phegan said in
the NSW District Court he was satisfied the scientific evidence was strong enough to at “least raise a possibility, a real possibility, that the explanation for what happened on this occasion was a state of sleep-driving caused by the use of the drug”.
Mr Kingston was charged with a mid-range drink driving offence after being involved in a collision last April near his Lane Cove home. He had been on the wrong side of the road, and was in shorts and a T-shirt despite frosty temperatures.
Before the accident, he had made a bizarre phone call to a friend who had just left Mr Kingston’s house after visiting for dinner. During the call, Mr Kingston complained to his friend that several couples were waiting outside his home wanting to rent rooms from him.
After the accident, the friend suggested Mr Kingston get a blood test, which showed traces of Stilnox in his blood.
Judge Phegan said Mr Kingston’s state of undress, his apparent
hallucination
, the fact he was on the wrong side of the road and his inability to remember anything were consistent with a state of “automatism” - where a person has no control over their actions - caused by taking the drug. This was different to being heavily intoxicated, where a person still has some control over their actions, he said.
Annabel Stafford
Drunk driver was ‘sleep driving’ - National - BrisbaneTimes
WHy all the not so good news for men only?
read this:…………..
Rising to the challenge
April 10, 2008
SOME men suffer falls in the number, function and quality of their sperm due to infections such as influenza, says Rob McLachlan, director of Andrology Australia at the Monash Institute of Medical Research.
A dose of mumps after puberty can be a “serious assault on the male gonads”, leading to permanent infertility. Cancer treatment, too, can destroy sperm cells.
The issue of age harming a man’s fertility has been “somewhat oversold”, McLachlan argues.
“The majority of cases are genetic. Usually their fathers or brothers don’t have infertility; it’s usually just that particular man.”
However, the cause of perhaps 90 per cent of genetic male infertility is unknown, “and that’s frustrating because we can’t treat things when we don’t know the cause”.
The advice of Andrology Australia (
Andrology Australia
) is that smoking, alcohol consumption, sexually transmitted diseases, heat stress from tight-fitting underwear and vaginal lubricants can all be harmful to sperm.
Steve Dow
Rising to the challenge - Health - Life & Style Home - brisbanetimes.com.au