Our Precious Bodily Fluids

by Geoff Shullenberger

This essay appears in Issue 2 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race

by Shanna H. Swan with Stacey Colino

Scribner, 304 pp., $15.31

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Over the past 50 years, one of the leitmotifs of American conspiracy theory has been the threat posed by invisible chemicals seeded into our water, food, and air. Back in the 1950s, water fluoridation provoked a backlash on these grounds from anti-Communist hardliners. Fluoridation campaigns, they claimed, were no innocent attempt to improve dental hygiene: The infusion of fluoride in the water supply was a plot to weaken the U.S. population and render it more vulnerable to Soviet domination.

Several decades later, the “chemtrails” theory circulated on early online forums, leaving many Internet users convinced by rumors of airborne bioweapons hidden in airplane vapor trails—all in service of the shadowy New World Order. The belief that COVID-19 was not, in fact, a virus, but a mysterious toxin spread by 5G towers, which took hold in conspiracy circles in 2020, was a more recent reiteration of the same basic idea.