finally, some sense

The six largest manufacturers of baby bottles have decided to stop making them with Bisphenol-A.

This comes on the heels of the House vote (76-21) to ban BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups.  As well as the move by major retail chains (Babys’R'us and Target) to stop selling the products.

It should be noted that this is a voluntary move by the manufacturers.  However, and this is a big HOWEVER, they are NOT going to stop using BPA in products sold overseas.  

I don’t know about you, but I kind of read this like… Americans deserve to not be poisoned.  Foreigners, not so much.

Thoughts?

bpa: investigated and reported

In this incredible piece from Fast Company Magazine, BPA is summarized: it’s history and why the government doesn’t want to claim it’s dangerous. Making about $6 billion per year for chemical companies, you can see why there is a strong desire to keep it legal.

The article is long, about eight pages, so as always below are some excerpts.  But in all seriousness, this is an amazing write-up.  Please give David Case (the author) the visibility it deserves.  

Along side a wonderful history lesson, there is also some interesting information about the “independent research” performed by the chemical companies.  Including the hiring of Sciences, an independent lab, that has, in the past, done some deceitful things to help out other harmful industries, like tobacco.  It should be noted that Sciences was started by a woman that also helped start the EPA.

-How could our nation’s health watchdogs reach such divergent conclusions? Are we being unnecessarily scared by the NTP? Or could the FDA be sugarcoating things? What exactly is going on?  We went on a journey to find out. What we learned was shocking. To some degree, the BPA controversy is a story about a scientific dispute. But even more, it’s about a battle to protect a multibillion-dollar market from regulation. In the United States, industrial chemicals are presumed safe until proven otherwise. As a result, the vast majority of the 80,000 chemicals registered to be used in products have never undergone a government safety review. Companies are left largely to police themselves.

-Of the more than 100 independently funded experiments on BPA, about 90% have found evidence of adverse health effects at levels similar to human exposure. On the other hand, every single industry-funded study ever conducted — 14 in all — has found no such effects .  It is the industry-funded studies that have held sway among regulators. This is thanks largely to a small group of “product defense” consultants — also funded by the chemical industry — who have worked to sow doubt about negative effects of BPA by using a playbook that borrows from the wars over tobacco, asbestos, and other public-health controversies.

-But Fast Company has learned that Sciences’ conflicts of interest went even deeper. The firm had passed its verdict on BPA, under oath, even before it began the government review. In 2003, Sciences provided expert testimony for the defense in a lawsuit over BPA. On an archived page of the firm’s Web site, the company bragged that, for a private client, it had acted as an expert witness “challenging the validity” of the science on BPA’s health risks. “The case was decided in favor of the defendants,” the site said. (Anderson, who sold Sciences for $5.1 million in 2001 and left for rival Exponent in 2006, confirmed by email that the testimony happened but declined to provide details. Herman Gibb, who took over as president of Sciences, says the staff working on the CERHR contract was not aware of the testimony.)

The NIH terminated the Sciences contract in April 2007, and the firm is now down to four employees. The Environmental Working Group has since reported that Sciences had client relationships with the makers of nearly every chemical it reviewed under the CERHR contract.

** photos by Nigel Cox, taken from Fast Company article