Follow May. 10, 2021 Is humankind really facing “Spermageddon,” a decline in sperm count that could spell the end of the species? Maybe, maybe not. A new paper by researchers from Harvard University, MIT and other top-notch institutions provides an alternative interpretation of the facts cited in a 2017 meta-study, which warned of a drastic 60 percent drop in sperm count in the West during the last 50 years. The original paper, by Hagai Levine of the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine, Shanna Swan and colleagues, said that sperm concentration (the number of sperm per milliliter) had plunged by 52.4 percent in the West.