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Cleveland Clinic: Microwave News Article Archive (2004 - )

May 8, 2007

A study that stirred worldwide uneasiness last fall —as well as quite a bit of disbelief— is now in print. In October, Ashok Agarwal of the Cleveland Clinic presented a paper at a fertility conference showing that men who used their cell phones for more than four hours a day had poorer semen quality than those who went phone-free (see our October 26, 2006 post).

Agarwal's paper has been posted on the Fertility and Sterility Web site and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal. Here is his conclusion: "Use of cell phones decrease the semen quality in men by decreasing the sperm count, motility, viability, and normal morphology. The decrease in sperm parameters was dependent on the duration of daily exposure to cell phones and independent of the initial semen quality." 

October 26, 2006

The last time we checked earlier today, there were 124 different articles listed on Google News pegged to a report that cell phones can damage sperm quality. The more hours a day men spent on their phones, the greater the harm to the count, motility, viability and morphology of their sperm, according to a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, being held this week in New Orleans. Every major paper in England ran a detailed story, as did news media in Australia, India and New Zealand. (We didn't check foreign language outlets, though we did see links to some in China and Turkey.)

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