Bisphenol-A: Toxic in Canada, But OK in the U.S.?

When you have young children, you have a lot of plastic items no matter how "green" a household you try to maintain. Little kids are clumsy and drooly, and it's just not safe to have them handling heavy glass items all the time.

So when I heard "Bisphenol-A" mentioned in two separate stories on NPR in one day, I felt we'd finally gone into red alert on a widely-used, hormone-altering substance that's found in lots of children's items--like baby bottles, kid's plates and flatware, teething rings, and of course, toys.

First the NPR stories: household pets have large (measurable) quantities of polyfluorocarbons (PFCs) and other toxins in them.

Your cat probably has more mercury in its system than you do, and your dog has twice as much of the chemicals found in stain-resistant carpets and couches. That's the conclusion of an environmental group that tested pets for a wide range of industrial chemicals.

And the second story, on #7 plastics (the little number inside the triangle on the bottom of all plastic items):

Michael D. Shelby, director of the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction, says a report on the safety of Bisphenol A [BPA], a chemical used in some plastics, finds it might cause cancer, early puberty and neural and behavioral changes.

Now what's horrifying is that cans--like those used for wet animal food or to store infant formula--are also a source of Bisphenol-A, or BPA.

Dr. Shelby (mentioned in the story above) does not recommend that parents get rid of all plastic baby bottles, and does not recommend one kind of plastic over any other. But the presence of BPA in items that can leach into food eaten by very young children is enough of a concern that the Canadian government will soon take the step of labelling BPA a toxic ingredient.

Canada would be the first country to make a health finding against B.P.A., which has been shown to disrupt the hormonal systems of animals.
...
“If the government issues a finding of toxic, no parent in their right mind will be using products made with this chemical,” said Rick Smith, the executive director of Environmental Defence, a Canadian group that has been campaigning against B.P.A. “We will be arguing strongly for a ban on the use of this chemical in food and beverage containers.”

While all of this is enough to throw parents into a panic, the point of having this information is to demand that our government keep up with truly impartial science on BPA and regulate the chemical's use.

The Food and Drug Administration is the regulatory agency that covers oversight of BPA's safety determination. Lest you think BPA is a new substance, you should know that for over 50 years now it's been used in cans and plastic items (yet no long-term studies were ever done on its effects) and that for several years, various non-profit health watchdog groups have been issuing warnings about BPA's use and criticizing the FDA's reliance on plastics industry-funded studies for evidence of safety.

One such watchdog organization, the Environmental Working Group, has this to say about the FDA:

[The] FDA is using flawed and unpublished studies funded by the plastics industry to make decisions that may impact the health of millions of people. Almost 100 peer-reviewed and published animal studies confirm that BPA is toxic at low doses. FDA based their analysis of BPA health risks on just two studies, both of which were funded by the American Plastics Council and one of which has not even been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Worse yet, the FDA did this in response to a Congressional inquiry that just concluded in the beginning of 2008:

In January, Michigan Democrats Rep. John Dingell, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and Rep. Bart Stupak, who leads a subcommittee, launched an investigation into the use of bisphenol A in cans containing baby formula and other products aimed at infants and toddlers.

It's a bad combination: kids are most at risk when it comes to environmental toxins, because metabolically speaking, their bodies are in overdrive. Yet kids have no fat-walleted lobbyists like the American Plastics Council, and they can't vote.

In addition to its ill effects on growing children's bodies, there is also significant evidence that BPA "has the ability to alter the activity of genes in normal breast cells in ways that resemble what is found in extremely dangerous breast cancers, according to a new study."

With Canada's move to ban the use of BPA in plastics as early as May of this year, the worry is that if our regulatory agency continues to be lax, the U.S. will become the dumping ground for inferior plastic that other nations have determined is too toxic to eat or drink from. No country or people should become that dumping ground; the EU is also leery of BPA and has made its own recommendation on appropriate levels of ingested BPA.

We need our FDA to get a spine. And I suggest that we can help them if they need help growing one.

We also need lobbyists to stop influencing our regulatory agencies, which is why we need a Democratic president who'll enact policies that guarantee governmental transparency and ban the revolving door between lobbyists and lawmakers.

ETA: our sister-patriots at MomsRising are circulating this petition, which they'll send to the CEOs of major manufacturers of baby bottles (Avent, Disney/First Years, Dr. Brown’s, Evenflo, Gerber, and Playtex). So please add your name, and make your vote count for two, or three, or however many kids are depending on you.

Cynematic's personal blog is P i l l o w b o o k.

 

Comments

[Kady]

Nalgene announced today that it would stop using polycarbonate in its bottles:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/business/18plastic.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=nalgene&st=nyt&oref=slogin

Of course, this is all a case of MSM (and corporations) jumping on the hip news of the day. The science around endocrine disruption and hormone mimicry has been around for ages. This is the book that did it for me:

http://www.amazon.com/Our-Stolen-Future-Threatening-Intelligence/dp/B000HIV0B8/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208544251&sr=1-1

If you want to read something that will make you cry, this will do it. It is also one of the most compelling and well-researched books I have ever read.

But the leeching of endocrine disruptors from plastic is well documented and not limited to BPA. When I worked for evil corporation (ok, in this respect they were not so evil) we did a lot of work to remove PVC from all of our products, also a plastic known to leech hormone mimicry chemicals.

And it gets worse. The humans that get exposed to these chemicals MORE THAN ANY OTHER ANIMAL ON THE PLANET are breast feeding newborns. Yes, you read it right, BREAST FEEDING NEWBORNS. Because these chemicals are fat soluable, they basically dissolve in fat and stay in your body that way. Furthermore, the farther up on the foodchain you are, the more you accumulate the fats of all the animals below you in the food chain. Guess who's at the top of the food chain?

When women lactate, they produce milk by breaking down fat in the rest of their body. The same fat that already has the highest concentration of toxins and hormone mimicking chemicals among animals because of our place on the food chain is broken down and fed to our babies.

This is not an anti-breast feeding rant. Scientists have studied this issue and have concluded that DESPITE these toxins being passed on, breast feeding is still best.

But seriously, why is this only news now???

[cynematic]

Kady, it is enough to make you weep.

Or rant: the science that shows clear (clear enough for me) harm, the maddeningly toothless FDA, the congressional inquiry that sputtered out, the inescapability of these environmental toxins.

You're right, also, that this hasn't only been news now. It's been news for quite some time. My reading of it is that journalists use any little news hook they can to keep putting it in front of people, to try to punch through the apathy and inattention that covers us like a fog.