Ivermectin causes sterilization in 85 percent of men, study finds

[caraher]

35. Apparently that 85% figure is badly supported

The gist: it's not part of the Nigerian study but comes from a report referenced (badly) by the paper. That report resists confirmation because the reference leads nowhere.

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This is a Nigerian study on patients with river blindness, and I’m so sorry to tell you this but river blindness is a truly horrific condition that is endemic mostly in sub-Saharan countries, and it is caused by worms in your eyeballs. You get it by getting bit by a fly that has the worms. As you may have learned in my previous video, ivermectin specifically attacks nerve cells found in invertebrates, so the treatment for river blindness is to take ivermectin once a year for ten to 15 years.

So. The “85%” figure comes NOT from this study linked in the tweet but from a reference to a “report” the authors mention. Their citation of that report isn’t written correctly so I had to go searching for it, and in doing so I found another curious person who found the same thing. Because this is the internet, I must refer to him as “Falcon Darkstar.” Falcon…Mr. Darkstar…points out that the Journal of Biomedical Investigation wasn’t published until 2003, but the reference points to 2002. He couldn’t find any similar report and I can’t either. So sorry, but we have to throw out the 85% idea unless and until we see a real study on it.

The actual study linked looked at 385 patients with river blindness, which would be a great number of subjects to have, so it’s unfortunate that they dismissed 90% of them for various reasons like “too low of a sperm count already,” leaving them with a scant 37 subjects. Of those, they found that for various reasons, 60% of the patients lost fertility after taking ivermectin. And that’s it! A handful of men experienced a drop in fertility, but we don’t know for how long, or why, or if this is just a statistical blip due to having so few subjects in the study. And, knowing that the authors couldn’t even cite a report from a journal that existed at the time they say it was published, are we really confident in the rest of their data?