Tuesday, September 16, 2008

My intuition always told me this....but did I listen..........................................................
What the Chemical Industry Doesn't Want You to Know about Everyday Products
By
Elaine Shannon, AlterNet. Posted September 15, 2008.



"It takes a lot of nerve to go up against the $3 trillion-a-year global chemical industry.
Ask University of Missouri-Columbia scientists Frederick Vom Saal and Wade Welshons. They've been in the industry's crosshairs for more than a decade, since their experiments turned up the first hard evidence that miniscule amounts of bisphenol A (BPA), an artificial sex hormone and integral component of a vast array of plastic products, caused irreversible changes in the prostates of fetal mice.
Their findings touched off a steady drumbeat that has led to a ban on BPA-laden baby bottles in Canada, mounting support for a similar ban in the U.S., major retailers pulling plastic products off their shelves, a consumer run on glass baby bottles and a blizzard of scientific reports raising increasingly disturbing questions about the chemical's dangers at the trace levels to which people are routinely exposed.
But back in early 1997, when the Missouri team produced its pioneering research on low-dose BPA, challenging the chemical-industrial complex seemed quixotic, even risky. Soon after the report appeared, a scientist from Dow Chemical Company, a major BPA manufacturer, showed up at the Missouri lab, 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."

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.

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.
Industry officials called the study flawed and lacked proof of BPA danger to the human brain. Yale team leader Csaba Leranth says the experiment, the first major neurological study using primates, was designed "to more closely mimic the slow and continuous conditions under which humans would normally be exposed to BPA." He said the study is "more indicative than past research of how BPA may actually affect humans," but his team hopes to conduct additional studies to advance understanding of BPA on primate brain functions.
But, says Leranth, "science is expensive," and grants for ambitious projects are scarcer than ever, due to the Bush administration's commitments overseas and spiraling federal debt."

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