News Stories Archive | Page 6 of 9 | Facts About BPA

If there are three letters that strike fear in the hearts of Canadian parents, it’s BPA. But, in a recent paper in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier professor Simon Kiss argues that Health Canada’s decision to classify BPA as toxic in 2008 was the result of political and cultural factors, not because science shows it’s unsafe. Bisphenol A, or BPA, is a synthetic compound that’s been in use since the 1950s. An additive to harden clear plastics, it’s also in the paper that receipts are printed on, and in the lining of food cans. Most of us have detectable traces of it in our urine. However, whether BPA has any effect on humans at typical exposure levels is deeply controversial, even among scientists.

An increasingly frequent and worrisome phenomenon that unnecessarily threatens human health and the natural environment is “regrettable substitutions,” which refers to bans or limitations on certain products, even though the alternatives might pose risks that are uncertain or greater. It calls to mind the old saying “out of the frying pan and into the fire.” Today, members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee are marking up legislation to reform the nation’s law on chemicals — the Toxic Substances Control Act. As they work, they should heed the lessons related to regrettable substitutions.

The periodic scares over chemicals in vaccines, foods and other products are typically a war on the periodic table, and one compound that on all of the evidence deserves exoneration is bisphenol-A, or BPA. The latest research deserves more attention before more federal dollars are wasted.

Both the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have recently released assessments that strongly support the safety of bisphenol A (BPA).

For many years, scientists around the world have been intensely interested in bisphenol A (BPA), a common chemical used to make polycarbonate plastic and epoxy resins.  But what have we learned from the supersized investment in research on this one chemical, and what can we expect in the future? Recent articles suggest that we haven’t learned as much as might be expected from such a large investment, but more research on BPA is probably in our future anyway.

The amazing rendezvous last week of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft with a comet 317 million miles from the Earth after a ten-year journey depended on the astrophysicists and engineers who built the hardware and programmed its trajectory in keeping with the laws of celestial mechanics. They would have known immediately if they had made an error because the rendezvous would never have taken place. In the field of high-energy physics, as I was told by Professor Robert Adair of Yale, if a young scientist publishes a result that is not confirmed by others, he/she will be granted slack, because “anyone can make a mistake.” However, if he/she publishes a second finding that is not confirmed, that person had better look for another profession.

With an estimated 40 percent of Americans, according to a Harvard poll, worried that they could contract Ebola, two days ago the journalPLoS ONE published a paper which claims to show that handling of cash register receipts puts you a risk of myriad diseases. The paper is from a group at the University of Missouri headed by Frederick vom Saal, a biologist who has the distinction of being the driving force behind the subgroup of scientists who are convinced that BPA is wreaking havoc with our endocrine systems and our health. The study describes experiments in which 24 subjects cleaned their hands with a hand sanitizer and then handled thermal cash register receipts.  In a second step, subjects who had handled the thermal paper then ate French fries with their hands.  Due to the solvent action of the hand sanitizer, BPA was absorbed rapidly through the skin, resulting in, what the authors call, “high levels” of BPA in the blood and urine.

In her “Poison Pen” blog in last week’s New York Times, the science writer Deborah Blum calls attention to new research that raises alarming questions about adverse effects on the female reproductive organs from exposure to BPA (bisphenol-A).  Her article is titled, “In Plastics and Cans, a Threat to Women.” Blum described work by Jodi Flaws, a researcher at the University of Illinois, that appeared to show that exposing female mice in utero or at an early age to BPA, at levels comparable to those encountered by humans, induced adverse effects on the ovaries.

There’s an emerging trend, of late, in the seemingly endless saga of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA), which is most commonly used to make polycarbonate plastic and epoxy resins.  Although the BPA saga has not yet become completely passé, much of the attention that had been given to BPA is now focused on alternatives to BPA. Indeed, it seems that BPA-Free is becoming the new BPA.