Badder living through chemistry?
Okay, so the pun is bad.
This is about bisphenol A (BPA).
What the Chemical companies don't want you to know.
The global chemical industry annually produces about 6 billion pounds of bisphenol A (BPA), an integral component of a vast array of plastic products, generating at least $6 billion in annual sales. The value of BPA-based manufactured goods is probably incalculable. Environmental Working Group studies have found BPA in more than half the canned foods and beverages sampled from supermarkets across the U.S.
Soon after scientists Frederick Vom Saal and Wade Welshons found the first hard evidence that miniscule amounts of BPA caused irreversible changes in the prostates of fetal mice, a scientist from Dow Chemical Company showed up at the Missouri lab. He disputed the data and declared, as Vom Saal recalls, "We want you to know how distressed we are by your research."
"It was not a subtle threat," Vom Saal says. "It was really, really clear, and we ended up saying, threatening us is really not a good idea."
http://www.alternet.org/story/98809/
By that time, Vom Saal, Welshons and their Missouri colleagues realized that they had a tiger by the tail. The financial stakes were mind-boggling. The global chemical industry produces about 6 billion pounds of BPA annually, generating at least $6 billion in annual sales. The value of BPA-based manufactured goods, from cell phones and computers to epoxy coatings and dental bindings, is probably incalculable. Though scientists have known since the 1930s that BPA mimics estrogen in the body, for unrelated reasons, the chemical serves as an essential building block of hard, clear polycarbonate plastics and tough epoxy resins, ubiquitous materials in the modern world.
"It's probably the largest volume endocrine-disrupting chemical in commerce," says Vom Saal. "This stuff is in everything." Because plastics made with BPA break down easily when heated, microwaved, washed with strong detergents or wrapped around acidic foods like tomatoes, trace amounts of the potent hormone leach into food from epoxy lacquer can linings, polycarbonate bottles and other plastic food packaging.
Environmental Working Group studies have found BPA in more than half the canned foods and beverages sampled from supermarkets across the U.S., in baby bottles and in the linings of nearly all infant formula cans. "Can you imagine," says Vom Saal, "extracting estrogen out of a packet of birth control pills and making baby bottles out of it? It's an act of insanity."
...
By the turn of the Millennium, dozens of scientists were launching their own investigations of the chemical. Among them was Washington State University reproductive scientist Patricia Hunt, who had become intrigued with BPA because of a laboratory accident. In 1998, she was studying eggs from normal and mutant mice when, she says, "all of a sudden, the control data went completely crazy and the eggs from perfectly normal females were showing us something really bizarre -- stronger abnormalities than we were seeing in the mutants."
Hunt's search for lab contaminants led to a temporary lab aide who had washed the plastic cages and bottles with a caustic floor detergent, unleashing enough BPA into the control animals' food and water to scramble the chromosome alignment in their eggs.
What Hunt saw under her microscope stunned her. "Like most Americans, I thought, my government protects me from this kind of stuff," she says. The incident convinced her that "we're up against big industry, and they're running pretty effective damage control." She locked down into BPA research for the better part of a decade, eventually concluding that "exposure to low levels of BPA -- levels that we think are in the realm of current human exposure -- can profoundly affect both developing eggs and sperm."
...
The industry's scorched-earth approach has caused many advocates for toxic law reform, frustrated with skirmishing state by state and toxin by toxin, to line up behind a comprehensive federal legislative proposal, the Kid-Safe Chemicals Act, that would require chemical manufacturers to prove substances like BPA are safe before they go on the market.
Meanwhile, a research team from a Yale University medical school research team has come up with some of the most troubling data yet: after injecting African green monkeys for 28 days with BPA at the level the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says is safe for people, the researchers found the chemical "causes the loss of connections between brain cells." "We observed a devastating effect on synapses in the monkey brain," says Yale scientist Tibor Hajszan. In humans, these losses could lead to memory and learning problems and depression.
...
With no prospect in sight for definitive answers about BPA's dangers to people, federal regulators must confront a mass of incomplete but worrisome evidence and decide whether it's time to say that the chemical's risks to people, especially babies and children, outweigh its benefits. And if they don't, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, and Rep. Ed Markey, D-MA, have introduced legislation that would ban BPA in food packaging -- and make the decision for them.
Also at
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/10/11/what-the-chemical-industry-doesn-t-want-you-to-know-about-everyday-products.aspx?source=nl
BPA - which mimicks the sex hormone estradiol -- is a building block for polycarbonate plastics and tough epoxy resins. As I discussed earlier this week, BPA-containing plastic is so pervasive it shows up in many places you might not have considered, such as in the linings of canned goods, where it leaches into your food and drink.
...
As described in the article above, chemical companies like Dow are not above using threats and forceful intimidation when plain money doesn’t do the job. (Monsanto’s ruthless “seed police” are another giant swinging a big club, with a reputation for suing small farmers out of their homesteads.)
But this is not the first time Dow Chemical’s less than ethical tactics have been exposed.
The International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal has tried to get Dow to own up to its poisoning of the village of Bhopal for over two decades, and accuses the multinational of using strong-arm tactics to intimidate the habitants of Shinde Vasuli into submission to build another chemical experimentation facility near their Indian village.
In 2002, Dow Chemical interrupted internet use for thousands, and closed down hundreds of unrelated websites after intimidating Verio into shutting down the ISP of a critical parody website.
And more recently, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) forced Mary Gade to quit her job as head of the EPA’s Midwest office after her interactions with Dow Chemical. Gade had been locked in a heated dispute with Dow about long-delayed plans to clean up dioxin-saturated soil that extends 50 miles beyond its Midland, Michigan plant. The company had been dumping the highly toxic and persistent chemical into local rivers for most of the last century.
In an interview on May 1, 2008, Gade said of her forced resignation: "There"s no question this is about Dow. I stand behind what I did and what my staff did. I"m proud of what we did."
The rest of the article and some of the comments are interesting.
Kid-Safe Chemicals Act
This is about bisphenol A (BPA).
What the Chemical companies don't want you to know.
The global chemical industry annually produces about 6 billion pounds of bisphenol A (BPA), an integral component of a vast array of plastic products, generating at least $6 billion in annual sales. The value of BPA-based manufactured goods is probably incalculable. Environmental Working Group studies have found BPA in more than half the canned foods and beverages sampled from supermarkets across the U.S.
Soon after scientists Frederick Vom Saal and Wade Welshons found the first hard evidence that miniscule amounts of BPA caused irreversible changes in the prostates of fetal mice, a scientist from Dow Chemical Company showed up at the Missouri lab. He disputed the data and declared, as Vom Saal recalls, "We want you to know how distressed we are by your research."
"It was not a subtle threat," Vom Saal says. "It was really, really clear, and we ended up saying, threatening us is really not a good idea."
http://www.alternet.org/story/98809/
By that time, Vom Saal, Welshons and their Missouri colleagues realized that they had a tiger by the tail. The financial stakes were mind-boggling. The global chemical industry produces about 6 billion pounds of BPA annually, generating at least $6 billion in annual sales. The value of BPA-based manufactured goods, from cell phones and computers to epoxy coatings and dental bindings, is probably incalculable. Though scientists have known since the 1930s that BPA mimics estrogen in the body, for unrelated reasons, the chemical serves as an essential building block of hard, clear polycarbonate plastics and tough epoxy resins, ubiquitous materials in the modern world.
"It's probably the largest volume endocrine-disrupting chemical in commerce," says Vom Saal. "This stuff is in everything." Because plastics made with BPA break down easily when heated, microwaved, washed with strong detergents or wrapped around acidic foods like tomatoes, trace amounts of the potent hormone leach into food from epoxy lacquer can linings, polycarbonate bottles and other plastic food packaging.
Environmental Working Group studies have found BPA in more than half the canned foods and beverages sampled from supermarkets across the U.S., in baby bottles and in the linings of nearly all infant formula cans. "Can you imagine," says Vom Saal, "extracting estrogen out of a packet of birth control pills and making baby bottles out of it? It's an act of insanity."
...
By the turn of the Millennium, dozens of scientists were launching their own investigations of the chemical. Among them was Washington State University reproductive scientist Patricia Hunt, who had become intrigued with BPA because of a laboratory accident. In 1998, she was studying eggs from normal and mutant mice when, she says, "all of a sudden, the control data went completely crazy and the eggs from perfectly normal females were showing us something really bizarre -- stronger abnormalities than we were seeing in the mutants."
Hunt's search for lab contaminants led to a temporary lab aide who had washed the plastic cages and bottles with a caustic floor detergent, unleashing enough BPA into the control animals' food and water to scramble the chromosome alignment in their eggs.
What Hunt saw under her microscope stunned her. "Like most Americans, I thought, my government protects me from this kind of stuff," she says. The incident convinced her that "we're up against big industry, and they're running pretty effective damage control." She locked down into BPA research for the better part of a decade, eventually concluding that "exposure to low levels of BPA -- levels that we think are in the realm of current human exposure -- can profoundly affect both developing eggs and sperm."
...
The industry's scorched-earth approach has caused many advocates for toxic law reform, frustrated with skirmishing state by state and toxin by toxin, to line up behind a comprehensive federal legislative proposal, the Kid-Safe Chemicals Act, that would require chemical manufacturers to prove substances like BPA are safe before they go on the market.
Meanwhile, a research team from a Yale University medical school research team has come up with some of the most troubling data yet: after injecting African green monkeys for 28 days with BPA at the level the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says is safe for people, the researchers found the chemical "causes the loss of connections between brain cells." "We observed a devastating effect on synapses in the monkey brain," says Yale scientist Tibor Hajszan. In humans, these losses could lead to memory and learning problems and depression.
...
With no prospect in sight for definitive answers about BPA's dangers to people, federal regulators must confront a mass of incomplete but worrisome evidence and decide whether it's time to say that the chemical's risks to people, especially babies and children, outweigh its benefits. And if they don't, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, and Rep. Ed Markey, D-MA, have introduced legislation that would ban BPA in food packaging -- and make the decision for them.
Also at
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/10/11/what-the-chemical-industry-doesn-t-want-you-to-know-about-everyday-products.aspx?source=nl
BPA - which mimicks the sex hormone estradiol -- is a building block for polycarbonate plastics and tough epoxy resins. As I discussed earlier this week, BPA-containing plastic is so pervasive it shows up in many places you might not have considered, such as in the linings of canned goods, where it leaches into your food and drink.
...
As described in the article above, chemical companies like Dow are not above using threats and forceful intimidation when plain money doesn’t do the job. (Monsanto’s ruthless “seed police” are another giant swinging a big club, with a reputation for suing small farmers out of their homesteads.)
But this is not the first time Dow Chemical’s less than ethical tactics have been exposed.
The International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal has tried to get Dow to own up to its poisoning of the village of Bhopal for over two decades, and accuses the multinational of using strong-arm tactics to intimidate the habitants of Shinde Vasuli into submission to build another chemical experimentation facility near their Indian village.
In 2002, Dow Chemical interrupted internet use for thousands, and closed down hundreds of unrelated websites after intimidating Verio into shutting down the ISP of a critical parody website.
And more recently, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) forced Mary Gade to quit her job as head of the EPA’s Midwest office after her interactions with Dow Chemical. Gade had been locked in a heated dispute with Dow about long-delayed plans to clean up dioxin-saturated soil that extends 50 miles beyond its Midland, Michigan plant. The company had been dumping the highly toxic and persistent chemical into local rivers for most of the last century.
In an interview on May 1, 2008, Gade said of her forced resignation: "There"s no question this is about Dow. I stand behind what I did and what my staff did. I"m proud of what we did."
The rest of the article and some of the comments are interesting.
Kid-Safe Chemicals Act