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10 Established 1961 Analysis Monday, March 12, 2018 Established 1961 The First Daily in The Arabian Gulf THE LEADING INDEPENDENT DAILY IN THE ARABIAN GULF ESTABLISHED 1961 Founder and Publisher YOUSUF S. AL-ALYAN Editor-in-Chief ABD AL-RAHMAN AL-ALYAN EDITORIAL : 24833199-24833358-24833432 ADVERTISING : 24835616/7 FAX : 24835620/1 CIRCULATION : 24833199 Extn. 163 ACCOUNTS : 24835619 COMMERCIAL : 24835618 P.O.Box 1301 Safat,13014 Kuwait. E MAIL :[email protected] Website: www.kuwaittimes.net How infertility treatment has left sperm science behind hey can make test-tube babies, grow human eggs in a lab and reproduce mice from frozen Ttesticle tissue, but when it comes to knowing how a man’s sperm can swim to, find and fertilize an egg, scientists are still floundering. Enormous advances in treating infertility in recent decades have helped couples conceive longed-for offspring they previously would not have had. Yet this progress has also been a workaround for a major part of the problem: Sperm counts are falling drasti- cally worldwide - and have been doing so for decades - and scientists say their honest answer to Xi mandate seals march of strongmen why is: “We don’t know”. Infertility is a significant global health problem, he Chinese Communist Party’s decision to give Chinese model the country has taken a decisive turn away from the with specialists estimating that as many as one in six President Xi Jinping a mandate to rule for life is fur- Human rights campaigners warn that authoritarians idea of a more pluralistic society with greater political couples worldwide are affected. In more than half of ther evidence of the world’s slide towards more and autocrats worldwide are exploiting discontent over freedoms. those cases, experts say, the underlying problem is T nationalist, authoritarian regimes, analysts said. China’s globalization, industrial decline, terrorism and migration And, thanks to its fast economic growth and growing in the male. Most of the focus of infertility research rubberstamp parliament, meeting in the imposing Great to justify their actions. According to the Freedom House military might, it is serving as a counter-example for the has been on women, however: on what can reduce Hall of the People for an annual session, made Xi the most human rights watchdog, democracy “faced its most democratic model - with fans in sometimes surprising their fertility and on how that can be averted, com- powerful leader since Mao Zedong yesterday by scrap- serious crisis in decades” in 2017, which was the 12th places. “The great leaders of the world come from coun- pensated for or corrected with treatment. While this ping term limits that would have forced him to step down year in a row that individual freedoms were found to tries that are not great democracies,” said for- approach has produced results - and babies - it has after 2023. have declined. Furthermore, under Trump mer French president Nicolas Sarkozy also left male infertility scientifically sidelined. The decision moves one-party China further away the US has lost the moral authority to at a conference in Abu Dhabi last Treatments such as in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and from adopting a democratic system that many Western effectively condemn abuses in oth- weekend. Sarkozy, who faces multi- intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), where the thinkers and politicians had once assumed was inevitable er countries, critics say, while ple investigations over corruption sperm is placed into the egg rather than next to it, as the country opened up to global trade. It fits a pattern Europe is struggling with its allegations related to his one term bypass the male problem rather than treating it, said worldwide that has seen the model of liberal democracy - own nationalists in Hungary in office from 2007-2012, said Richard Sharpe, professor at the University of based on individual rights, the rule of law and the free and Poland. strong leadership in China, Edinburgh’s center for reproductive health. “The press - lose ground as many countries turn instead to “This illiberal temptation is Russia and Saudi Arabia treatments - some of them quite invasive - are to the more authoritarian forms of government. something we should not take meant there was “no pop- female partner. So the female is having to bear the “We think it (liberal democracy) is normal and obvious- lightly today and will doubt- ulism” there. burden of the male’s sub-fertility ...(And at the same ly it’s not, because in the whole of human history, democ- less constitute one of the bat- Kenneth Roth, director of time), we have a very crude snapshot of what is racy has not existed for all that long in terms of the inter- tles France, but also the Human Rights Watch, said going on in the male.” national order,” said George Magnus, associate at the European Union, will have to democratic leaders have a We know that sperm counts are dependent on China Centre at Oxford University. Regimes with illiberal undertake in 2018, including responsibility to speak out high levels of testosterone, and there is some knowl- leaders “reject the kind of democratic model we have kind with some of its members,” against autocracies and edge of links between sperm count and infertility, of grown up with,” he added. French President Emmanuel despots who depend on experts say. But beyond these basics, sperm’s intrica- These include Vladimir Putin of Russia, Turkey’s Recep Macron said in January. large-scale repression to cies remain largely undiscovered. “Without under- Tayyip Erdogan, and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, keep their grip on power. “It standing the biology of how normal sperm work, we who all came to power through the ballot box but have ‘Managed democracies’ is important for democratic can’t possibly understand how they don’t work, or since trampled democratic norms. Other global contem- In the 1990s, intellectuals leaders both to highlight the how to correct the problem,” Sarah Martins Da Silva, porary strongmen include Egypt’s Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi, such as Francis Fukuyama emptiness of the autocrats’ a reproductive medicine specialist at the University who took part in a coup against a democratically elected questioned whether humanity political programs and to of Dundee told a London briefing this week. Islamist government. “It is certain that the club of man- had reached the “end of histo- stress the danger of enabling Sperm counts in men from America, Europe, aged (or guided) democracies is growing,” said Caroline ry”, with liberal democracy and leaders who claim to speak for Australia and New Zealand have dropped by more Galacteros, director of the Planeting strategic intelligence capitalism apparently victorious the majority,” he said. “China has than 50 percent in less than 40 years, according to consultancy in France. over communism and totalitari- been providing economic support pooled research published last year, described by In Europe, Hungary’s Viktor Orban has become a anism. But by the turn of the cen- to autocrats around the world and one of its authors as an “urgent wake-up call” for posterboy for what he calls a form of “illiberal democracy” tury, analysts were warning of the increasingly is trying to silence criti- further investigation. while US President Donald Trump also embodies a emergence of semi-authoritarian cism of its own autocratic model even spreading strain of aggressive nationalism worldwide. states - countries that like Turkey within liberal democracies.” He cited Still in the 1950s Trump’s “America First” mantra and attacks on institutions and Russia fall somewhere between Beijing’s close financial links to repres- Experts say that to address the basic unanswered such as the FBI, the judiciary and the free press are testing democracy and dictatorship. China’s sive regimes in countries such as clinical and scientific questions in andrology - the the democratic checks and balances in the US constitution. trajectory was always unknown, but Venezuela and Zimbabwe. —AFP study of male reproductive health - would require research ranging from large, ideally international, epidemiological studies to detailed lab work to decipher exactly how sperm cells function. Allan Pacey, a senior lecturer in andrology at Britain’s respect you,” said Kalachev. The US and Europe hit months, according to official polls, around 70 percent of Sheffield University, said even at a basic level - the Putin: Villain Russia with sanctions in 2014 over the annexation of those who are planning to vote say they will back the diagnosis of a possible male fertility problem - the Crimea and Moscow’s backing of rebels in Ukraine’s current president. His closest competitor, Communist science is lagging. The techniques of sperm analysis abroad, hero east. Since then Russia’s support of the Syrian regime in candidate Pavel Grudinin, is projected to garner less than - examining ejaculate under a microscope, counting a bloody civil war, allegations that Moscow interfered in eight percent of the vote. “(Putin) expertly exploits all the the sperm, assessing how well they swim, and seeing US presidential elections and the discovery of a state- fears and the complexes of the population,” Kalachev what they look like - were invented in the 1950s, he at home sponsored Olympic doping program have said, adding that the greatest fear was a said. “And we are still doing the same thing now.” further hurt the country’s reputation return to the instability of the 1990s. So while estimates suggest as many 1 in 20 young o the West he is public enemy number one: abroad. Putin often frames negative “People are afraid of losing what men now have sperm counts low enough to impair Snatching land from his neighbors, interfering foreign coverage of his leadership they already have...and this fear is fertility, that remains educated assumption, rather Tin foreign elections and unveiling weapons that as a sign that Russia is under especially strong in the provinces, than data from specific studies.

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