PRINTSperm donation in Columbia
A few good men; meet Columbia's dynamic donor duo
EVE EDELHEIT
Only two men in Columbia donate sperm. Both men had to go through testing to get approved to be sperm donors.
December 9, 2010 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Two men — only two — carry out a secret mission in Columbia. They’ve passed psychological evaluations and physical examinations to become the best of the best. You might not know it at first glance, but these are extraordinary male specimens. And as anonymous sperm donors, these men are a rarity not only in Columbia, but also in the rest of Missouri.
Several fertility clinics from Kansas City to St. Louis offer freeze-your-own services, but when it comes to anonymous donations, few are willing to look local. Rather than support an expensive donor program of their own, clinics such as those in Columbia turn to established banks such as California Cryobank, headquartered in Los Angeles.
With more than 280 donors, it has the country’s largest inventory of John Doe specimens categorized by height, weight, hair and skin color, ethnicity, religion and education. Other megabanks such as Fairfax Cryobank in Virginia offer a similarly wide selection with more than 190 options. Shipping is relatively inexpensive compared to the hundreds of dollars a vial costs, so local banks with fewer than 10 donors haven’t much to compete with.
Erma Drobnis, director of andrology at MU Reproductive Medicine and Fertility, says her cryogenic lab is one of the few in Missouri that conducts the costly screening and storage of anonymous specimens, and it currently has only two active donors.
Out of 11 candidates screened in 2009, one donor passed. When he donates, he receives $30-60 a donation for time and inconvenience, but the payment depends on the number of vials yielded to encourage abstinence between visits. Donors can go up to three times a week and have to wait at least two days between donations. Once the samples are ready, they are offered by the Missouri Center for Reproductive Medicine and Fertility, located in the Keene Medical building north of Columbia Regional Hospital.
When looking for donors, clinics such as Drobnis’ will only accept men between the ages of 20 and 35 because the older the sperm is, the higher the chances are it will carry genetic abnormalities. They preferably seek married men who have families and aren’t overweight. They also can’t smoke, drink or use drugs. It takes up to two months to screen donors, and on average only one in 20 applicants will qualify. The men undergo a psychological evaluation that addresses becoming an unknown parent. A genetic counselor determines whether there is family history of heart attack or other potentially inherited diseases, and a urologist looks for potential signs of sexually transmitted infections. Drobnis’ clinic recruits donors via electronic newsletters, but the response has been low so far. They have two donors, and they want 10. But not everyone is cut out for the job.
“Sperm donors are special men,” says Gilbert Wilshire, a doctor at Mid-Missouri Reproductive Medicine & Surgery, located on East Broadway near the Boone Hospital Center. “They need clean genetics, no drug use and a very high count.” Fifteen million sperm per milliliter is considered average, according to the World Health Organization, but donors need a much higher concentration to improve the chances of fertility — closer to 100 million per milliliter.
Wilshire’s clinic performed about 500 inseminations in 2009. Most of the treatments were done using donor sperm from CryoGam, a Colorado bank in Loveland. With about 40 donors, CryoGam is smaller than California Cryobank but relatively affordable at $300 per vial. At banks, samples donated by Ph.D. holders, however, can cost hundreds more per vial. Successful inseminations often require multiple vials, so the cost to the recipient adds up. Wilshire says he doesn’t see the value for most patients in choosing the Ph.D. sperm. Rather, a successful insemination and healthy child are more important considerations.
The vials sold by Drobnis’ clinic are considerably less expensive at $150, but there are fewer samples to choose from. Where are all the potent men? They are in big cities, according to a surprising 2003 study in Environmental Health Perspectives. The research found that proven fertile men (the sample was taken from the partners of expectant mothers) in Columbia had significantly lower sperm counts than those in larger cities such as Minneapolis, New York City and Los Angeles. The study went on to compare sperm counts from Iowa City, Iowa, and its numbers were even worse.
“We thought the cities would be lower,” says Drobnis, a consultant for the study. “We were flabbergasted.”
Columbians should likely blame pesticides in the environment for its poor sperm counts, as indicated by the study. Yet there are two men out there unaffected by smoking, drinking, obesity or rural life. They often walk into the sperm bank unnoticed. They drop their sealed samples into a mailbox-like depository on their way out. All that can be said about these unsung do-gooders is that the clinic needs more than just two. Maybe the third is you.
