Mothers, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys

Friendly confines.

President Bush, in a speech Wednesday morning to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, will talk about the war on terror and the need for the Iraq security plan to get fully under way.

He will not, I'm sure, talk about this.

Men whose mothers ate a lot of beef during their pregnancy have a sperm count about 25% below normal and three times the normal risk of fertility problems, researchers reported Tuesday.

The problem may be due to anabolic steroids used in the United States to fatten the cattle, Dr. Shanna H. Swan of the University of Rochester Medical Center reported in the journal Human Reproduction. It could also be due to pesticides and other environmental contaminants, she added.

If the sperm deficit is related to the hormones in beef, Swan's findings may be "just the tip of the iceberg," wrote biologist Frederick vom Saal of the University of Missouri-Columbia in an editorial accompanying the paper.