Are We Engineering Our Own Extinction?

By: Dr. Adam J Gushgari, Senior Director – Emerging Contaminants, Eurofins Environment Testing USA

One of the most fascinating aspects of working at the intersection of environmental contamination and public health is how frequently the emerging research catches you off guard. Some of it is truly astonishing. And the findings that stick with me most are the ones with direct implications for the future health of our species, our planet, or both. There are so many pervasive negative health trends we have documented over the last two decades, with no single cause ever cleanly attributed, and I find myself returning to the same instinct: there has to be an environmental component here somewhere.

I'm in my mid-30s, at a point in life where everyone around me is having children, and I can't help but notice that early family life today feels fundamentally different from the one my parents navigated. We have more to worry about now. Screen time, social media, mental health, ultra-processed food, these are concerns that simply didn't exist in the same way a generation ago. And layered underneath all of it, for me, is something most parents aren't yet talking about: the complex environmental chemistry that is almost certainly influencing the physical and neurological development of our kids. That's part of what draws me to endocrine disrupting compounds. It hits close to home. I have two young daughters, and this issue has only grown more pressing in the years since I was first introduced to this contaminant class nearly a decade ago.

The Data We're Not Talking About

I don't think it's discussed enough, but the argument can be made that we are in the midst of a global fertility crisis. It's easy to understand why the conversation stalls. Reproduction and early family life are deeply personal, and infertility carries a stigma that keeps a lot of people silent. But the data is hard to ignore.

Sperm counts in men across North America, Europe, and Australia have declined more than 50% since the mid-1970s, with that decline accelerating after 2000. Over the same period, testosterone levels in age-matched cohorts have dropped measurably, and testicular cancer incidence has risen sharply, particularly in young men. On the female side, PCOS now affects an estimated 8 to 13% of reproductive-age women globally, and endometriosis affects roughly 10% of the same population. These are not rare conditions anymore. Globally, fertility rates have measurably fallen in most high-income countries, time-to-pregnancy has increased across multiple longitudinal studies, and IVF use has grown dramatically across all demographics.

The fertility data alone would be concerning. But it doesn't stop there. The same populations showing declining reproductive health are also raising children who, by multiple measures, are developing differently than previous generations did. Diagnoses of ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, and childhood anxiety have risen across virtually every developed nation tracking them over the last three decades. Improved diagnostic awareness and broadened clinical definitions account for some of that increase, and it's worth noting that. But the trends are too consistent, across too many independent health systems, to be explained by better counting alone. Age of pubertal onset has been declining for decades, with key developmental milestones now occurring years earlier than mid-20th century norms. Pediatric obesity rates have tripled in the United States since the 1970s, with metabolic dysregulation increasingly implicated alongside dietary factors. As a father of two young children, I don't read these statistics abstractly. These are the conditions shaping the world my daughters are growing up in.

Something is driving this. And the evidence is increasingly pointing toward the chemical environment we have built around ourselves.

A Different Kind of Threat

Endocrine disrupting compounds are a unique class of environmental contaminants because they don't follow the rules we've built our entire regulatory framework around. Acute toxicity is a high-dose, short-duration problem. Carcinogenicity is a low-dose, long-duration problem. EDCs are neither. They operate at trace concentrations, during specific developmental windows, and the outcomes can be life-altering, sometimes appearing years or decades after the exposure itself. That's a fundamentally different threat model, and our regulatory systems were not designed for it.

Two of the most well-documented examples illustrate the point clearly. Bisphenol A, commonly known as BPA, is a synthetic estrogen mimic found historically in plastics and food packaging liners. Even at vanishingly small concentrations, BPA can interfere with estrogen signaling during fetal and early childhood development, with documented associations to reproductive abnormalities, early puberty onset, and metabolic disruption. Phthalates, a class of plasticizers found in everything from vinyl flooring to personal care products to food packaging, are potent androgen disruptors. Prenatal phthalate exposure has been directly linked to reduced testosterone production, altered genital development in male infants, and diminished sperm quality in adult men. These are not hypothetical risks. They are outcomes documented across independent research groups, in multiple countries, over multiple decades.

The number of known EDCs is itself a contested figure. The Endocrine Society estimates that over 1,000 chemicals likely interfere with hormone action, while other assessments put the range somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 compounds. Those numbers sound significant even before you consider the broader context. A 2020 analysis identified approximately 350,000 chemicals approved for commercial manufacturing globally. Roughly 35% of those compounds are either protected behind patent and trade secret status, or so molecularly complex that we lack basic characterization data on them. That leaves somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 commercially active compounds whose interactions with human endocrine systems are essentially unknown. The question isn't just how many EDCs we've identified. It's how many we haven't looked at yet. Answering that question at any meaningful scale requires analytical infrastructure, both in terms of laboratory network reach and the breadth of techniques deployed, that very few organizations are positioned to serve.

And then there's the mixture problem. Humans are never exposed to a single contaminant in isolation. We carry dozens, sometimes hundreds, of these compounds simultaneously, and research has consistently shown that combinations of EDCs can produce effects greater than any individual compound would predict on its own. We don't have a regulatory framework that accounts for that. We test chemicals one at a time, in isolation, at doses far above real-world exposure levels. The gap between how we regulate these compounds and how they actually behave in the human body is significant, and potentially has serious public health implications.

Microplastics have added another layer of complexity to an already complicated picture. Particles have now been detected in human testicular tissue, placental tissue, and breast milk, and their presence in reproductive systems is no longer a theoretical concern. Microplastics may function as chemical vectors, adsorbing and concentrating EDCs like phthalates and BPA on their surfaces and delivering them directly into tissues. But emerging research suggests microplastics may also act as endocrine disruptors in their own right, independent of the chemicals they carry. We are still early in understanding the full scope of that exposure pathway, but the direction of the evidence is consistent, and it points toward a contaminant class that is already ubiquitous and not going away on its own.

Cautious Optimism

I'll admit I sometimes wonder if I've become a bit of a doomsayer. A colleague pulled me aside after a recent presentation and said "I was waiting for the good news, and it never came." I laughed, because I understood exactly what he meant. But here's the thing: I'm actually an optimist. A cautious one, but an optimist. And the cautious optimism in me sees a genuine path forward.

The core problem is structural. We have spent decades producing chemicals in a linear model, releasing them into a cyclical natural environment that has no mechanism to absorb them. Accumulation and persistence are not accidents – they are the predictable outcome of that mismatch. But predictable problems have predictable solutions, and the science behind green chemistry and bio-inspired material design has never been more capable, nor more applicable, than they are right now. The paradigm can shift. It has shifted before on difficult challenges, and it can shift on this one as well.

In the meantime, awareness is not a small thing. Understanding that these compounds exist, where they come from, and how they behave in the body is the foundation of every meaningful decision that follows, whether that's at the individual level, the policy level, or the manufacturing level. For families navigating these questions, knowing what's in your water, your home, and your environment isn't alarmism. It's information. And information is where informed decision-making begins. Eurofins Environment Testing operates one of the largest environmental laboratory networks in the country, with analytical capabilities spanning thousands of compounds across contaminant classes that most commercial labs aren't equipped to handle. That kind of infrastructure exists because the problem demands it, and because the answers are worth finding.

We have real messes to clean up, no question. But our world is not yet so far gone that the cleanup isn't worth pursuing.