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 governmental
transparency and ban the revolving door between lobbying and lawmaking.
Cross-posted on MOMocrats.
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