But you still take it orally...

A friend recently pointed me to this article in the Globe and Mail [Robitussin: Pregnancy in a $5 bottle of hope]. Apparently, couples having trouble conceiving are turning to the cough medicine Robitussin. And not just because nobody wants a partner with a wet, hacking cough. (Though I'm not up to date on the latest fetishes). The premise is simple: Robitussin contains guaifenesin which thins mucus. Women report that it also works on cervical mucus which facilitates the passage of sperm.

Unfortunately, while the theory makes sense there is little in the way of scientific study to back it up. The first report in the literature was in 1982 (described in the G&M article), and there is a single case study since then that involved guaifenesin use.

Not unexpectedly, that means most of the claims about guaifenesin and pregnancy remain in the realm of anecdote across message boards and in pregnancy books. Also unsurprisingly, many of the comments on the Globe and Mail piece blame the lack of study on Big Pharma conspiracy keeping down a cheap alternative to IVF. The original article is worth a read for a more balanced perspective.

"scrambling eggs in plastic bottles"

I must admit, I distrust people who carry a Nalg around everywhere they go. I mean i know water is good and all, but do you really need 2L of water everywhere you go? Isn't that what water fountains are for? Can you survive an hour in class without giving yourself a kidney failure and a water intoxication? Ok, at least it cuts down on disposable plastic bottle waste. I dislike people who pay 2$ for 500ml of tap water even more. Well now there is even more of a reason to ditch the Nalg, and other BPA-containing plastics. Bisphenol-A, an estrogen mimic screws up meiosis in mammals, at environmental levels: "We are exposed to BPA daily; it is a component of polycarbonate plastics, resins lining food/beverage containers, and additives in a variety of consumer products. More than 6 billion pounds are produced worldwide annually, and several studies have reported levels of BPA in human tissues in the parts per billion range." I mean it's bad enough that humans have miscarriage rates of nearly 20% compared to drosophila with 0.01%, now we have to worry about all these environmental estrogens: "BPA-induced damage to meiotic pairing and synapsis observed in mice by Hunt and her collaborators in the new study would not manifest itself for two generations. Thus, at least some of the effects of exposing a 26-year-old woman to chemicals such as BPA might take 20–30 years to manifest themselves in her grandchildren".
This paper in PLOS goes into even more details in the mechanisms: "In contrast, the studies described herein reveal an effect of BPA on meiotic chromosome segregation by a second, and completely independent, mechanism, that is,by disturbing synapsis and recombination between homologs in the fetal ovary. The finding that unexposed ERβ-null females exhibit a similar phenotype—and that the phenotype cannot be enhanced by BPA exposure—suggests that BPA exerts its effects on the fetal ovary by interfering with ERβ-mediated cellular responses."