A couple struggling for months to have a baby were shocked when doctors told them that their laptop was to blame.

Doctors had told 30-year-old Scott Reed that having the electronic appliance on his lap had caused heat damage to his sperm, which made it harder for him and his wife Laura, who is also 30, to conceive, according to the Daily Mail.

Afterwards, Scott stopped laying the laptop on his lap and started using it on a table, and three months later Laura became pregnant.

"I've never heard of this happening before, when the doctors told us it was a real shock," Laura said, according to the Daily Mail.

"Scott would use his laptop in the evenings for a couple of hours on and off while we were watching television," she said. "He would use it for work and general things like Facebook. We had absolutely no idea the damage it was causing him."

Scott and Laura had visited their doctor after trying to conceive for six months without success. They had originally thought that mumps caused Scott's fertility problem. They said that when Scott was 21 years old, he had suffered mumps, a highly infectious viral disease caused by the mumps virus and in extremely rare cases can lead to infertility.

"About six months after we started trying I was getting frustrated and mentioned it to my doctor," Laura said. "You don't think it will be that hard to get pregnant. We both went back to have a chat and the doctor put Scott forward for a fertility test."

In October 2010, Scott and Laura had been referred to the andrology department of the pathology unit at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth, where doctors found that while Scott was producing a healthy amount of sperm, they had all suffered heat damage.

Microscopic images showed that the tail of Scott's sperm had coiled around the head, which meant that his sperm couldn't swim quickly to the egg.

"I never thought using a laptop would affect the quality of my sperm. After asking if I was a chef, the next thing was 'do you use a laptop?'" he said. "I was using it daily and hadn't given it a second thought. It was quite shocking really."

After the discovery, Scott made sure he placed his laptop either beside him or on a table.

"We carried on trying and we weren't having any luck. We thought it wasn't going to happen so we started planning a trip to travel around Thailand. But then I did a test and found out I was expecting,"

The couple gave birth December 8 2011 to their baby daughter Taryn who is now 10 months old.

Scott is now encouraging more men to be aware of the dangers of laptops and to come out if they think there could be a problem with their fertility.

"Generally men clam up and don't want to talk about anything to do with genitals. Don't be scared of going through the process. I wanted children and so I got tested."

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