IS THE WORLD READY FOR MALE CONTRACEPTIVE PILLS?
Have you heard about male contraceptive pills? 98 percent of you will answer this by saying ‘NO’ with a bewildered expression on your faces. Well, formulating contraceptive pills for males is quite difficult but not impossible. Researchers from the University of Washington are trying to develop one such drug but there are many complications –
- While women produce one egg each month, men produce more than 1000 sperms every second. Turning off something that enormous is pretty difficult.
- If a man is given high dosage of testosterone his brain will stop producing gonadotropins, the hormones which help testes in sperm formation. That’s the reason why bodybuilders are often infertile. But it is not necessary that it’ll work for all men.
- Before taking such a pill, the guy will have to undergo certain tests in order to verify whether the pill will work for him or not and let’s be honest, no one is going to make such an effort!
- World Health Organization funded a project across 8 countries for formulating hormone-based contraception methods for men but they withdrew their support since there were some serious side effects of the pills. Men can’t really digest the fact that they are not producing enough sperms. Many participants, who took part in the initiative, went into depression.
- So there’s no hope for such medication? That’s not entirely true either. There are many other methods which can be applied to form male contraceptives. The researchers are now adopting new approaches. A protein called ‘eppin’ is being developed that coats the surface of the sperm so that it can’t swim. Also, they are trying to counter the process through which sperms generate energy required for travelling.
- Another popular approach is related to vitamin A production. Human testes need this nutrient to produce sperms. No vitamin A, no sperms. Let’s wait for another 5-7 years and we might be able to remind the hunks, “take your pills honey before the action”.
