California Senate Votes to Ban BPA In Food
Containers
Source of
Article: http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2009/06/ca_bpa.html FDA still contends small amounts of the
chemical are not harmful
FDA
still contends small amounts of the chemical are not harmful By Mark Huffman June 3, 2009 It’s looking ever more
likely that the state of California will place limits on bisphenol A, or BPA,
before the Food and Drug Administration ever issues a definitive ruling on
the chemical. The California Senate Tuesday narrowly voted to ban the
chemical from infant formula bottles, toddler sippy cups and other food
containers. A number of
studies have suggested the chemical is a danger to normal childhood
development, though the FDA’s official position is that small amounts are not
harmful. BPA is added
to the plastic manufacturing process to provide rigidity. It’s what makes
plastic water bottles, for example, stiff instead of pliable. However, a
recent Harvard study
found that small amounts of BPA will leach from the bottle into the water. The
California Senate bill was sponsored by Sen. Fran Payley, who managed to push
it through in spite of heavy industry lobbying. Outlook for passage in the
Assembly is unclear, as the industry mounts an all-out effort to prevent a
ban. Among those
arguing that BPA risks are overblown is STATS, a statistical analysis
organization based at George
Mason University in Fairfax, Va. In a study
released last month, STATS found toxicologists "overwhelmingly
reject the notion that exposure to even the smallest amounts of harmful
chemicals is dangerous or that the detection of any level of a chemical in
your body by biomonitoring indicates a significant health risk." Chemical
industry lobbyists maintain that the studies raising questions about BPA have
been vastly overblown by environmental and health groups who have already
made up their minds without seeing all the evidence. But consumer groups say
more than 200 independent studies have thus far linked BPA to development
problems in young children, and more recently, to other health problems. For example,
last September a study in JAMA linked higher levels of BPA to cardiovascular
disease, type 2 diabetes and liver-enzyme abnormalities. BPA is one of the
world's highest production–volume chemicals, with more than two million
metric tons produced worldwide in 2003 and annual increase in demand of 6
percent to 10 percent annually. Such was the
concern abut the chemical that Wal-Mart announced back in April 2008 that it
would stop selling baby bottles made with BPA in its U.S. stores. "Widespread
and continuous exposure to BPA, primarily through food but also through
drinking water, dental
sealants, dermal exposure, and inhalation of household dusts, is evident from
the presence of detectable levels of BPA in more than 90 percent of the U.S.
population," the authors said. "Anecdotal"
evidence
In individual
accounts, consumers blame BPA and other chemicals for health problems they
say decreased or went away when exposure to the suspect substances stopped. One account
comes from a former over-the-road trucker who told ConsumerAffairs.com that
he became ill after habitually drinking water from plastic containers which
had gotten hot while sitting in his truck. "In
spite of the fact that my lungs and respiratory system were on fire and
congested, my face flaming red and I lost part the lining of my intestines in
a rest area -- and some of my family thought my wife was poisoning me -- the
doctors couldn't come up with an answer," the former trucker said. "When I
came off the truck and quit drinking water from plastic jugs which had gotten
hot in the truck I started to gradually improve but still had some
respiratory problems which seemed to be aggravated by some of my blood
pressure medication. However I didn't experience any real improvement until
after we moved into another home -- with city water -- and quit drinking
water from plastic containers," he said. BPA in urine
In the
Harvard School of Public Health study, researchers found that BPA leaches
from bottles and ends up in the urine of people who drink from them. The
researchers found that study participants who drank for a week from
polycarbonate bottles, the popular, hard-plastic drinking bottles and baby
bottles, showed a two-thirds increase in their urine of the chemical, also
known as BPA. The study was
the first to show that drinking from polycarbonate bottles increased the
level of urinary BPA, and thus suggests that drinking containers made with
BPA release the chemical into the liquid that people drink in sufficient
amounts to increase the level of BPA excreted in human urine. The study
appears on the Web site of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. “We found
that drinking cold liquids from polycarbonate bottles for just one week
increased urinary BPA levels by more than two-thirds. If you heat those
bottles, as is the case with baby bottles, we would expect the levels to be
considerably higher. This would be of concern since infants may be particularly
susceptible to BPA’s endocrine-disrupting potential,” said Karin B. Michels,
associate professor of epidemiology at HSPH and Harvard
Medical School and senior author of the study. Recent published
reports suggest the FDA relied heavily on the advice of chemical industry
lobbyists in reaching that conclusion.
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