Male Infertility in Bangladesh: What Serve Better-Pharmacological Help or Awareness Programme?

Treatment of male infertility is one of the challenging tasks in developing nation given the nature of tradition and superstation of 'professed confidentiality'. Traditionally, the issue of human infertility is mainly considered 'infertility in women' which is a mistaken and orthodox attitude. Due to a number of constraints especially collecting data, research in this area is often ignored. However, since it is a vital area to investigate in order to mapping the scenario and to provide policy guidance especially for awareness and for further course of actions of both governmental and institutional as well as family levels, we took an initiative to work at this area using the small amount of data available at Infertility Treatment and Research Centre (ITRC), in Bangladesh. Since July 2004 about 9000 couples have been recorded and evaluated at the ITRC. Three semen analyses have been made with an interval of one week. Special care was taken for collection, preservation and analysis in respect of macroscopic, microscopic and biochemical analysis. Repeated microscopic examination has been made in some cases to avoid errors. The fructose test was done for azoospermic in every sample at ITRC laboratory. Our study indicates that in 60% cases, male are responsible for Infertility either fully or partially. Of them 40% were azoospermia 34% were oligospermic and the rest 5% were asthenospermia and teratospermia 1% case was due to non descendent and mal development of testes rest per cent was design as unexplained infertility. This paper suggests that awareness on male infertility helps more than having medical treatment with pharmacological aid and supplement.