This from the great NYU Clinical Correlations website.  Enjoy

Hello again Primecutters and welcome to another edition of your favorite weekly blog. Our fearless editor has allowed me a repeat performance of last week and I am honored to provide the followers of this column with another scintillating tale of the week’s medical knowledge.

A group of researchers report findings that water from plastic bottles have a higher estrogen effect on snails than water from glass bottles (at least in Germany). This is a fascinating result and the group claims this is the first time anyone has shown an estrogen effect in living creatures. Hopefully this will be the final nail in the coffin on the bottled water craze. This whole fad seems to have run its course though I'm not sure it will completely go away. New York City in particular is going through a lot of soul-searching over the environmental harms of bottled water.

The 73rd Annual Scientific Meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology in Orlando saw several studies presented relating to the efficacy and safety of using probiotics in the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome. Probiotics were found both to alleviate symptoms and help normalize the frequency of bowel movements for patients suffering diarrhea or constipation relating to Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). Dr. Paul Moayyedi and colleagues of several universities undertook a meta-analysis which was then presented at the ACG Annual Scientific meeting in Orlando.

The Cornell Medical Center's Peter Schlegel and Cigdem Tanrikut have published a new study linking antidepressants with reduced male fertility. The drugs which are prescribed to millions of American men are though to impair fertility by damaging the sperm's DNA. This new study follows on from a 2006 project at the Cornell Medical Center in New York City in which two male patients had developed low healthy sperm counts having been prescribed two different selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). SSRIs are the most common prescribed class of antidepressant drugs.