Here are some stories that caught our eye this week.
Elizabeth
Study: Plastic May Interfere with IVF Success
by Pacific Fertility Center Team
Published by Pacific Fertility Center
“BPA is a chemical used to make plastic hard and shatterproof—and it can leach from containers into food and drinks. Acting as an endocrine disrupter, it mimics the hormone estrogen—and can derail reproduction and other systems dependent upon hormones to work well.”
by Debra Rubin
Published by New Jersey Jewish News
The organization is running a variety of infertility awareness campaigns including the “Mikvah Infertility Awareness Campaign (which) places posters in ritual baths; for many observant women, performing the monthly immersion is a repeated painful reminder of their failure to become pregnant.”
Reining in sperm could lead to unisex contraceptive
By Aaron Heinrich
Published by Gizmag
“The researchers found that the key is a type of protein receptor that sits on a sperm’s tail and responds to the female sex hormone progesterone.”
“If the receptor protein doesn’t recognize progesterone, you would be infertile,” said Melissa Miller, a postdoctoral fellow at both UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco and the first author of a paper reporting the discovery. “This gives us an understanding of another pathway that is involved in human sperm activity.”
