A BIRTH CONTROL DRUG FOR MEN WAS A LONG TIME COMING

An experimental birth control drug was shown to be 100 percent effective at preventing pregnancy in mice. Oh, and it’s meant for males.

With the global rate of unintended pregnancies being nearly 50 percent, its no doubt that you would want to have some pretty reliable options when it comes to birth control.

When it comes to birth control, the industry has largely preferred women as their buyers of choice. And as you may have learned from Friends, condoms can be inaccurate at times.

When it comes to males, there are really only 2 options – condoms and vasectomy. Well, you could also stick to abstinence, but we know how that works out for most people.

“Here, we provide proof-of-concept for an innovative strategy for on-demand contraception, where a man would take a birth control pill shortly before sex, only as needed,” said the authors of the study.

Led by Dr. Melanie Balbach, a reproductive biologist, the team has designed a new drug that temporarily inactivates the movement of sperms, temporarily making the mice infertile. The drug was tested on 52 male-female mouse pairs and was considered highly effective with 2.5 to 3 hours of injection.

While contraceptives may considerably lower the risk of unwanted pregnancy, they don’t come without drawbacks.

Various studies have highlighted how contraceptives, especially hormonal ones, affect the sex life of individuals. In fact, it’s one of the biggest factors behind people stopping using contraceptives – usually due to a reduction in sex drive.

However, the researchers suggest that this drug did not cause any abnormal behavior in the mice, and “full fertility” returned the next day.

While the compound seems like a great idea, the question of how well its effects would translate from mice to humans still needs to be answered. Additionally, there might be some psychological problems that might only surface in human studies.