Pollution Threatens Human Fertility: It is Time to Make Our Gametes Great Again

Abstract

Historical examples of environmental pollution in wildlife have witnessed that mammalian reproduction is a process very highly sensitive to environmental toxins. Such example also exists in humans: it has been shown that breast-fed boys from women exposed to dioxins during the Seveso explosion have permanent reduced sperm quality. Those caricatural accidents have drawn attention on the possible links between environmental toxics and human reproduction and paved the way for studying the effects of much more insidious, chronic exposure [1-3]. The effects of toxics not only concern the exposed individuals, but also their progeny through transplacental impacts and/or epigenetic modifications with potential transgenerational inheritance, both leading to an actual problem of public health. Toxics can act on spermatogenesis as well as oogenesis, but also on embryonic and fetal development [4,5].