BOOK REVIEW
Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race
by Shanna H. Swan 2022
About the Author
Shanna H. Swan, PhD, is an award-winning scientist based at Mt. Sinai and one of the leading environmental and reproductive epidemiologists in the world. Dr. Swan has published more than 200 scientific papers and has been featured in extensive media coverage around the world.
About the Book
“Count Down is that rarest of books: a compelling and engaging overview that not only rings the alarm bell, but provides ideas for putting out the fire. Read this book if you want to protect your family’s health.”
—Rick Smith, coauthor, Slow Death by Rubber Duck
“Swan solves one of the great mysteries of the moment: why sperm counts and fertility rates are dropping. She zeroes in on chemicals as a chief culprit, but, even more admirably, maps out the entire threat landscape. This book shines an important light on what we need to do to bring back healthy reproduction.”
—David Michaels, former Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA and author of The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and The Science of Deception
“Unique, exhaustively researched, well-reasoned…Count Down makes a compelling case for changing what we think we know about the future of the human species.”
—Darrell Bricker, coauthor of Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline
In the tradition of Silent Spring and The Sixth Extinction, an urgent, “disturbing, empowering, and essential” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) book about the ways in which chemicals in the modern environment are changing—and endangering—human sexuality and fertility on the grandest scale, from renowned epidemiologist Shanna Swan.
In 2017, author Shanna Swan and her team of researchers completed a major study. They found that over the past four decades, sperm levels among men in Western countries have dropped by more than 50 percent. They came to this conclusion after examining 185 studies involving close to 45,000 healthy men. The result sent shockwaves around the globe—but the story didn’t end there. It turns out our sexual development is changing in broader ways, for both men and women and even other species, and that the modern world is on pace to become an infertile one.
How and why could this happen? What is hijacking our fertility and our health? Count Down unpacks these questions, revealing what Swan and other researchers have learned about how both lifestyle and chemical exposures are affecting our fertility, sexual development—potentially including the increase in gender fluidity—and general health as a species. Engagingly explaining the science and repercussions of these worldwide threats and providing simple and practical guidelines for effectively avoiding chemical goods (from water bottles to shaving cream) both as individuals and societies, Count Down is “staggering in its findings” (Erin Brockovich, The Guardian) and “will serve as an awakening” (The New York Times Book Review).
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