Re:Israel sperm banks find quality is plummeting
by ahi on Friday August 17, 2012 @09:21PM
(#4399780)
The article states that many of the sperm donors are IDF soldiers. I'd imagine their exposure to DU is a bit more intense than environmental background noise.
Re:Israel sperm banks find quality is plummeting
by adrianwaj on Friday August 17, 2012 @03:58PM
(#4398450)
You sound so sure of yourself with regards to DU. Do have a PhD in it?
Re:Israel sperm banks find quality is plummeting
by jandrewrogers on Friday August 17, 2012 @05:34PM
(#4398925)
I went to school for chemistry and chemical engineering. This is pretty elementary environmental chemistry, no PhD required.
There are an enormous number of popular myths about the toxicity, non-toxicity, and comparative toxicity of many elements and chemicals. Understanding the actual risks are part of a chemist's job. Most people lack the chemistry education required to put claims about particular chemicals into context, so their intuitions about the relative health risks of chemicals are often wildly incorrect. Many ubiquitous household items are much more of a health risk than DU, both chemically and as a radionuclide, but no one worries about it.
For example, thorium in the environment is a much greater health risk and far more common as well. One of the problems with studies of environmental non-depleted (read: worse) uranium exposure is that results tend to be dominated by effects of environmental thorium such that any effects from uranium are below the noise floor.
Depleted uranium is a pretty harmless environmental contaminant as heavy metals go. In the US we routinely dump thousands of tons of uranium around population centers in the form of coal ash. There are small but measurable health risks to living around coal ash, but those risks are attributed almost entirely to other components of coal ash (like the aforementioned thorium).
Environmental contamination by industrial organic chemicals is vastly more probable than uranium as a cause.