A chemical used in fireworks and explosives can damage sperm production. But vitamin C appears to reverse the harm.
Researchers at the University of Missouri exposed male fish to potassium perchlorate—a compound that accumulates in the blood of military personnel and industrial workers—and watched their fertility plummet. Testes showed clear damage. But when the same fish were given vitamin C alongside the chemical, fertility improved and testicular damage lessened.
The finding comes from Ramji Bhandari's lab, which studies how environmental contaminants ripple through reproductive health. Bhandari became interested in potassium perchlorate a decade ago after learning that military service members have higher infertility rates than the general population. Some soldiers had elevated levels of the chemical in their blood from repeated exposure to explosives.
We're a new kind of news feed.
Regular news is designed to drain you. We're a non-profit built to restore you. Every story we publish is scored for impact, progress, and hope.
Start Your News Detox"I became curious what impact that exposure may have on reproductive health," Bhandari says. His team used Japanese rice fish (medaka) as their model—not because fish are humans, but because their reproductive genes and biological processes mirror ours closely enough to reveal how the chemical works.
The mechanism turned out to be oxidative stress. Potassium perchlorate triggers a cellular imbalance that disrupts the genes and pathways involved in making sperm. Vitamin C, a well-known antioxidant, essentially mops up that damage and restores the molecular pathways needed for male fertility to function.
"Our discovery with a fish model offers hope that vitamin C may play a powerful role as an antioxidant in protecting sperm health," Bhandari notes. The work identifies potassium perchlorate as an emerging environmental contaminant worth taking seriously—and suggests a simple, accessible intervention for people in high-exposure settings like military bases, munitions factories, or contaminated industrial sites.
The catch: this is early-stage research. The jump from fish to humans isn't automatic. More work is needed to understand how preventative vitamin C treatment might actually work in people, at what doses, and for whom. But the pathway is clear enough that it warrants follow-up.
The research appears in Environmental Science and Technology.
