February 7, 2012 | 10:15 AM |

Checking Your Sperm Count With Help From The Local Pharmacy

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, fertility, pharmacies, sperm count

Is your sperm up to the task?

Soon, along with picking up prescriptions and getting a flu shot, men will be able to purchase a quick fertility test at the neighborhood drugstore.

Bloomberg reports that starting in April, Walgreen’s and CVS will sell a new product, SpermCheck, which will enable men to determine if they are fertile enough to get women pregnant. It’s being marketed as a way to “bridge the fertility gap” in which the burden is currently on women to establish their fertility.

In April, Walgreen’s 7,800 U.S. stores plan to start selling a fertility test that determines if a man is producing enough sperm to get a woman pregnant. Walgreen and CVS have already started selling SpermCheck Fertility online.

The blue-and-gold box, which features a smiling couple holding a newborn, will join more than two dozen varieties of female fertility tests in Walgreen stores. SpermCheck’s owner and distributor, closely held ContraVac Inc., is banking on women dropping an extra $40 for the test when they buy ovulation and pregnancy kits for themselves.

“In our society, the woman carries the burden of trying to determine the issues surrounding infertility,” said Ray Lopez, ContraVac’s chief executive officer. “Men don’t say, ‘Let me go to the urologist and give a semen sample.’”
That reluctance has created a $440 million-a-year market for male fertility tests in the U.S., Lopez says.

About the author

Blogger, CommonHealth Rachel Zimmerman worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, most recently covering health and medicine out of the paper’s Boston bureau. Rachel has also written for The New York Times, the (now-defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., among other publications. Rachel co-wrote a book about birth, published by Bantam/Random House, and spent 2008 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rachel lives in Cambridge with her husband and two daughters. View all posts by Rachel Zimmerman →

  • Reasonable?

    I’m guess the next innovation will be a disposable sperm count device that plugs into to your smartphone….lol

    But I think we need some “ordinal medicine” here.  What are the modifable causes of decreased fertility in men and woman.  Are there low cost interventions to address these causes….?

    My guess is YES, but the solution is probably less monetizable than 40 dollar test kits….