Laptop WiFi can damage sperm activity

Radiations from WiFi connections can reduce sperm activity in up to a quarter of men, a new study has suggested.

Conrado Avendano and his team from the Nascentis Medicina Reproductiva in Cordoba also found that working on a laptop wirelessly may hamper a man's chances of fatherhood.

The researchers took sperms from 29 men aged 26 to 45 and placed them either under a wi-fi connected laptop or away from the computer.

The laptop then uploaded and downloaded information from the Internet for four hours.

At the end of the experiment, 25 per cent of the sperm under the laptop had stopped moving and 9 per cent showed DNA damage.

By comparison, just 14 per cent of samples kept away from the wi-fi stopped moving, and just 3 percent suffered DNA damage.

Scientists from the University of Argentina believe that wireless connection creates electromagnetic radiation that damages semen.

"Our data suggest that the use of a laptop computer wirelessly connected to the internet and positioned near the male reproductive organs may decrease human sperm quality,' the Daily Mail quoted Avendano as saying.

"At present we do not know whether this effect is induced by all laptop computers connected by WiFi to the internet or what use conditions heighten this effect," he said.

A separate test with a laptop that was on, but not wirelessly connected, found negligible EM radiation from the machine alone.

The study has published in the journal Fertility and Sterility.