”Ultrasone geluiden kunnen mannen onvruchtbaar maken” (Utrasone sound can make men infertile) is a belated news article in a Dutch daily today, as the news item dates back to the year 2010. The research is financed by the Bill Gates foundation with the idea that it might be a tool to make men temporarily infertile for 6 month or so by directing ultrasound to their scrotum. A research till now on rats in labs, but we know that lots of people like to experiment with the sound limits and pleasures of their bodies in the laboratory of the discotheque.
Ultrasound scan are a must nowadays, no pregnancy without a video-photograph of the unborn, though recently unnecessary fun scans for inpatient parents are under debate. There is even a CD (UltraSound – Music for the Unborn Child) to let your child listen to music before it is born still on sale at Amazon with Debussy, Bach, Schubert and Chopin… The news item made me think, how come that ultrasound is used so often and even propagated on the one hand, while on the other it restricts and even stops male sperm production and may harm the fetus.
NaturalNews.com US web site did have the same question two years ago and tries to come up with some answers… and doubts. http://www.naturalnews.com/028853_ultrasound_fetus.html My tableau fuses the CD cover with spermatozoids fleeing the ultrasound.
If my association of ultrasound in discotheques and other spaces with ultra loud music for leisure with bodily harm and specifically fertility and unborn babies, has any ground in science, I could not yet find out. The association remains, nevertheless.
In a visual narrative scroll “Orbis Digitalium Pictus” I made a few years ago for an international theatre science congress ‘Orbis Pictus – Theatrum Mundi’ there is a small section on ultrasound, a way of visualisation known to me also directly in circumstances that were properly diagnostic. Likewise I have had the “pleasure” to be examined with such a sonar device as well, because ultrasound certainly is not just a ladies thing. In its origin it comes from industrial testing of materials and has had over half a century now of being applied in medicine.
the limping messenger 