Infertility is generally defined as the inability to conceive after one year of regular, unprotected intercourse. It affects approximately 15% of couples, with 40% of those cases being due to male infertility.

According to the World Health Organisation, if a man’s sperm count is less than 20 million per ml, he may be considered infertile. However, it’s not all about quantity – if a man is producing large amounts of poor quality sperm he may still be considered infertile.

Sperm quality includes motility (how well the sperm are able to swim in a directed manner), morphology (the shape and structure of the sperm) and their ability to penetrate the cervical mucous and outer covering of the egg in order to achieve fertilisation.

A man will most likely be considered sterile if his sperm count is less that 500,000 per ml.

• Article image - Human sperm stained for semen quality courtesy of Wiki Commons:
  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Semen_analysis.JPG (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike)

• Banner image courtesy of Flickr under creative commons license:
  https://www.flickr.com/photos/ir0cko/1394735993/

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Did you know..

The first IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born in July 1978 in the UK. Her own baby was conceived without IVF, and was born in 2006.