Word: profets
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While I was reading the report on Margie Profet's ''radical theory,'' which proposes that menstruation protects against sperm-borne infection ((HEALTH, . Oct. 4)), an obvious hole came to mind. Human females may engage in sexual intercourse, and thereby expose themselves to potentially harmful micro- organisms, at any time during their menstrual cycle. If a woman were to have sex the day after her menstrual period ended, it would be another three weeks before her uterine lining was again sloughed off, which is more than enough time for an infection to set in. Because of this constant risk of exposure...
...think Profet is strongly influenced by modern human sex practices: women receiving sperm without getting pregnant. This very new behavior, in the biological time scale, will have to continue for tens of thousands of years before it affects natural selection. Dan Sandberg, M.D. Uppsala, Sweden
Another debatable point is Profet's claim that menstruation is widespread in mammals. She acknowledges that this part of her theory is speculative, but she predicts she will eventually be proved right. "You can't say these animals don't menstruate just because you can't see it," she explains. "You have to dissect them to find it." Rasweiler agrees, but so far, he insists, there is little evidence that any more than a handful of species -- including primates, bats and elephant shrews -- menstruate. "If other species don't, that raises % the question of how they rid themselves of pathogens...
Taking a page from Profet's own method, some critics challenge her by citing history. Today's women can have 400 menstrual periods over a lifetime, but earlier women probably had only a few dozen. Without birth control, they spent most of their reproductive lives pregnant or nursing. "Women were never meant to menstruate on an ongoing basis," says Dr. David Olive, the head of endocrinology at Yale University medical school. If menstruation is supposed to be a rare phenomenon, then how can it be a primary defense against infection? In fact, it may turn out that menstruation...
...debate Profet has started may not be easily resolved. If nothing else, though, she has provided a fresh way of looking at an old mystery. It's not enough, she says, to know what happens during menstruation. The more intriguing questions: Why does it happen, and how did it help humans survive to be among evolution's winners...