Sperm counts down

jess where's my Geek of the Week award?

Sometimes I wonder if I am on the same planet as everybody else.
I read the thread title and my first thought was "10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1......Geronimo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Phthat's probably right absent

Canary - I had a mature student who was preparing for the mature student O-level English oral in which she had to report on a book she had read. Her choice? Steinbeck's 'Canary Row'. Good job she practised on me because I put her right and she passed.

Elegran Maybe that should have been phthanks.

Yes!

It's a form of TB isn't it? I didn't google that but will now to see if correct.

And for your GN Geek of the week quiz question - without looking it up - do you know what phthisis is?
I had do look it up at some stage, cos it is certainly not a word any of us are likely to meet in everyday life is it. Great decode the word challenge i suppose. Must try it on GD.

Elegran, it sounds like the Schonell reading test where the last word was metamorphosis.
In my first teaching job, the Head used to test every child in the school individually. Even in the seventies the children used to say canary with the stress on the first syllable, so they had to stop at that point.
There is a nice poem about it, which starts, "tree, little, milk, egg, book - I am in the slow reading group".

I think age and life choices may have a lot to do with it. I also think we are just more aware of problems nowadays. In the past, people just had to accept infertility. Now there is treatment so people want something to be done, therefore we hear more about it.

Could be that this is down to starting families later kitty. In our generation it was quite normal to have your kids in early 20s. These days many don't think of it until they are in their mid 30s.

From my completely non-scientific observations, all fertility seems to be on the decline. I have never known of so many women having problems with becoming and staying pregnant. Each of our daughters has had problems of one sort or another as have many of their friends. Luckily, advances in medical science can solve a lot of the problems that advances in other areas seem to have caused. At the risk of re-opening a closed can of worms - this puts a huge strain on the NHS!

Come to think of it, I seem to remember the teacher, so I was probably less than 8 - we moved then.

The reading test was one of those open ended ones - a list of words which you just kept reading out until you were told to stop, which I suppose was when you were making a lot of mistakes. They got harder and harder and phthisis could well have been the last one. That was the only one I knew I got wrong, although we were never told. I just read it out as fthisis but it seemed an unlikely word to even exist.

This is interesting.

Are they talking about sperm count regarding all ethnicities?

bags jess and nellie I fear you are being facetious

Here is the link to the research if you really want to know www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16602123.
It should be noted that the mice did not actually have fillings but the monomer (very concentrated compared to set filling material) was 'administered' to them each day for 28 days.
So how much we can infer about the risk to human beings from very small amounts of the material being placed in their mouths is a matter of conjecture.
But I think we can conclude that plastics may have biological effects on us.

I seem to remember that phthisis was the last word in some reading test or other.

Do mice buy cheese?

Blimey, Elegran, that was some reading test for a nine year old!

Elegran Thanks – I think.

absent It sounds unpronouncable! Like a word in a reading test I had once at the age of about 9 - phthisis! I've since disovered that it is another word for TB, but at the time it was completely alien to me.

Apparently phthalates is pronounced tha-lerts ignoring the ph altogether, phthisis can be tie-sis or thigh-sis. Should we ever need to say either of them out loud we now know how to.

Dear heaven one does admire the skills of some scientists. What kind of fine control would you have to have to do a dental filling on a mouse?
There was an interesting bit of research on stem cells in mouse milk and I thought..."they've been milking mice" WOW!

I never knew lab mice got dental fillings! Blimey, the things you learn on gransnet!

This is from the Daily Mail today

Scroll down to clingfilm.
Interestingly I bought some loose cheese in Waitrose yesterday and the assistant said they are not allowed to use clingfilm now and wrapped it in paper.

There is also evidence that Bis-GMA resins used in some dental filling materials can cause lowering of sperm counts in laboratory mice.

Actually it sounds very odd.