In early March 2010, foreign news reports said U.S. researchers found that the common herbicide "atrazine" would make the male frog degeneration into a female frog. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, put 40 male African claw frogs into water with a 2.5-zeros atrazine concentration and found 90% females, and 10% of them became female frogs, spawning after mating with the male frog, who was not in contact with Atrazine, and became a mother. The researchers believe that the herbicide interferes with hormonal secretion, causing the frog body to have both male and female characteristics, "which can make many frogs degenerate."
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The news is reminiscent of whether men in the human race also have sex changes due to environmental changes. It was found that the herbicide atrazine had effect on the content of estradiol in female and male rats, but the effect of atrazine on two alcohol content in male rats appeared earlier, which showed that male animals were more sensitive to atrazine.
The change of estradiol content in the blood was directly affected by the change of male sexual characteristics and the reproductive function of the rats. So will atrazine have a similar effect on humans?
Yu Bo of Jilin Medical College has studied human serum, and the results show that Atrazine has the ability to bind to serum components similar to that of natural hormones (i.e. testosterone, estradiol, two), and may compete with natural hormones, thus affecting the normal level of sex hormones in the organism. According to the above experiments, it is now possible to determine that atrazine can indeed cause a certain reproductive toxicity to male animals, but its effects on reproductive function of male animals and its mechanism is extremely complex, and now has not been studied clearly.