Interesting Links for 14-06-2015
- The Surprising Downsides of Being Clever
- (tags: iq intelligence happiness )
- The creation of Protestantism, as told through Facebook updates
- (tags: Facebook protestant catholicism history )
- Amazon commits to Terry Gilliam's 'lost' Don Quixote film
- (tags: Amazon TerryGilliam )
- Generating Magic cards using deep, recurrent neural networks
- (tags: ai magic ( Read more... )
No, I was indicating that the article starts talking about how dangerous BPA is then quickly moves to the fact that the stuff typically used doesn't have it. Then starts talking about how other chemicals are quite like BPA backs it with an article that shows that some plastics can leech chemicals that are like BPA.
I quickly read the BPA wikipedia page and came to the conclusion that I am not at all worried about BPA. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also holds the position that BPA is not a health concern. In 2011, Andrew Wadge, the chief scientist of the United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency, commented on a 2011 US study on dietary exposure of adult humans to BPA,[96] saying, "This corroborates other independent studies and adds to the evidence that BPA is rapidly absorbed, detoxified, and eliminated from humans - therefore is not a health concern."
You know what -- these people are generally very very conservative people. They know that these statements will be on record for many years.
Apparently there is some shenanigans on the wikipedia page -- for example the article claims that some children were found to have over the safe limit but the talk page suggests that in fact this was a unit confusion and the highest level found was 1/100th of the safe limit.
Also from the wikipedia talk page BPA is employed to make certain plastics and epoxy resins. BPA-based plastic is clear and tough, and is made into a variety of common consumer goods, such as water bottles, sports equipment, CDs, and DVDs Two problems with this. Firstly, BPA is not used in "certain plastics", it is basically used in ONE class of synthetic polymer, which is polycarbonate. Secondly, to list "water bottles" under "common consumer goods" is EXTREMELY misleading. Most readers will assume that "water bottles" means the bottles in which you purchase Evian water at the supermarket (or similar). In fact, polycarbonate is only used to make the 25 litre bottles of water that sit on top of office water dispensers. All drinks bottles including those in which mineral water is sold in shops are made from PET, which has no connection with BPA at all. This sort of thing only adds to the hysteria and pseudoscientific ramblings that we so commonly hear.
Which sort of confirms my fear of the bait and switch. BPA is arguably sort of dangerous to children and pregnant women in theory but not in practice. If you did somehow start using it for sous vide then it might (but maybe not) be slightly dangerous. Some sous vide plastics use similar chemicals and there is one report about that but not stating that they are dangerous.
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I'm not convinced that the evidence is in on BPA yet - but it looks like a lot of the major worries come from mouse research - and mice process it differently from humans. I'll keep an eye out.
(There's new stuff I've bumped into a few times recently like http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/08/140805090945.htm)
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As a precaution I'm going to not boil my water cooler if I'm pregnant.
(Sorry, flippant -- actually, you're correct, I agree that the evidence is not fully in here and if something new turns up then perhaps things need to be done -- but manufacturers it appears are already moving away from those chemicals.)
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