A Teachable Moment about Chemophobia

By Alan Caruba

Having written a series, “The BPA File”, in which I detailed the vast efforts made worldwide to ban bisphenol-A, a chemical in use for the last sixty years to protect food containers against spoilage and to strengthen plastic bottles against breakage, I naturally welcomed news that the Food and Drug Administration has recently concluded the claims made against it lacked “scientific information” to justify the claims that have been made against it.

In fact, it was news enough to merit an article in The Wall Street Journal.

Ask any physician about the role of chemicals in the lives of humans and you will learn that we are walking chemical machines that not only ingest the chemicals we need to live—food and liquids—but we manufacture them in our bodies to maintain our health and, at the same time, eliminate harmful chemicals on a daily basis. This is necessary because we live in a world composed of chemicals, from ordinary water to the vitamin and nutrient content of what we eat.

Ask any chemophobe—a person subject to fears about any and all chemicals—and they will begin to reel off the names of various compounds they are convinced will kill you. What they never seem to understand is that it is the dose—the amount of the chemical—that can constitute harm. In the case of the foods we eat, their processing and packaging, the dose is so small as to represent no harm whatever. Even ordinary potatoes contain arsenic!

That’s why another story caught my eye. It was from Environment Canada and said, “The government of Canada has decided that Siloxane D5 is not harmful to the environment.” This was a welcomed reversal of a 2009 assessment that questioned D5’s environmental safety. One can only hope that the U.S. government’s massive regulatory machine, in this case the EPA, gets the message that good science is essential to good decisions.

Environment Canada described D5, a material found in many consumer products, saying, “Decamethylcyclopentasiloxane (D5) is an odorless, colorless liquid found in a number of personal care products, including deodorants, antiperspirants, cosmetics, shampoos, and body lotions. It is used in the production of silicone polymers and may also be used as a dry-cleaning solvent and in industrial cleaning.”

One can only imagine how many chemophobes have decided not to wash themselves, use cosmetics or antiperspirants because they are convinced they will die if they do.

I picked up the phone to Karluss Thomas, the Executive Director of the Silicone Environmental health & Safety Council of North America (SEHSC) to inquire whether D4 was on some watch list in the U.S. and he noted it is on a list of some 80 compounds scheduled for review by the EPA.

Mr. Thomas noted that his trade association had filed an objection with Environment Canada regarding earlier concerns about D5 and was pleased that a first-ever Board of Review had been convened by the Canadian Environment Minister. The Board, after a rigorous review of the data, completely cleared D5 of any claims regarding its safe use. Three top, independent toxicologists gave it a thorough review. The findings, he said, had “broader implications” for any comparable review here in the U.S.

The Canadian action was a teachable moment for everyone who reads or hears similar claims about any chemical or product. Just as the PR campaign against Alar proved to be false and just as the latest claims against lean meat—labeled pink slime by its opponents—are equally bogus, real science inevitably disproves the claims.

Reliance on sound science leads to sound policy and spares society the harm that junk science causes to the economy, consumers, and to science itself.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Media Hypes BPA Ban, Endangers Everyone's Health

By Alan Caruba

A direct threat to the health of millions worldwide is being hyped by the media, continuing the anti-science, anti-fact, and pro-illness agenda of environmental organizations to ban BPA, a chemical that protects against food-borne disease and increases the safe use of all plastic containers.

From January through June 2011, I wrote and posted a six-part series called “The BPA File” that anyone can read on the blog I created for the series. Thoroughly research and documented, it was written because of my concern that this particular effort to ban the chemical would, like the ban on DDT, cause millions to die.

On February 16, Matthew Glans, the Midwest Director of The Heartland Institute’s Center on Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate, posted a commentary on its “Somewhat Reasonable” blog, “Media Biggest Proponent for BPA Ban.” My research files are filled with hundreds of examples of this and one need only Google “BPA” to find thousands of references to the chemical with the single theme of banning it.

As Glans points out and my series confirms, “Chemical BPA is a chemical used in plastics for many consumer products. Amongst other uses, BPA (is) most commonly used in hardened plastics and as part of the safety liner for food and beverage cans.”  (Emphasis added)

BPA is an acronym for Bisphenol-A and it has been in use for more than six decades, tested hundreds of times, and never found to post a threat to health, but rather as an essential packaging element to protect it.

Glans quotes an article by Business and Media Institute’s Julia Seymour who wrote that the “Fear of chemicals and ‘toxins’ is rampant among the so-called ‘environmental’ left. Unfortunately, that phobia infects national media coverage as well. For more than a decade, the Left has been on the attack against BPA, a product that is commonly found in plastics and other products.”

Ms. Seymour noted that “The Food and Drug Administration has a deadline of March 31 to respond to a petition by the National Resources Defense Council—an environmental group—that seeks to ban BPA. NRDC argues that the FDA should ban BPA on the basis that it causes harm to humans.”

If you read my BPA series, you will learn that BPA has been tested here and in other nations and has been found to pose no health threat whatever.

“Meanwhile,” said Ms. Seymour, “the media have exaggerated the threat of BPA for years. On the Feb. 25, 2010, CBS ‘Early Show’ broadcast, Katie Lee crossed the line from hype into outright falsehood when she said of BPA: ‘And that’s been shown to cause liver disease, heart failure, all sorts of things.”

“The Business & Media Institute analyzed ABC, CBS, and NBC reports as well as The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal that discussed BPA from Jan. 1, 2010 through Dec. 31, 2011.”

Incredibly, Canada, Japan, Denmark and France have banned the use of BPA for several products, including baby bottles. To date, “the FDA has been unwilling to declare BPA unsafe.” There’s a reason for that. Its history and the many tests of BPA have found it to be entirely safe.

Let’s understand a fundamental determination of what is toxic or not. As Paracelsus (1492-1541) said long ago, “All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison.”

If you take too much aspirin, too many sleeping pills, too many pain-killers, too many of any medication, it will likely kill you. This is why directions for their use are printed on every bottle. Substances like arsenic can be found in potatoes, but the amount of arsenic is so low that its ingestion poses no threat whatever. Moreover, our bodies possess organs that clean such substances from our bodies and evacuate them every single day.

The real toxins are the lies the media prints and broadcasts without researching the claims of environmental organizations that thrive on the income such scare campaigns generate and whose fundamental agenda is the reduction of the world’s population “to save the Earth.”

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Demonizing Bisphenol-A: The BPA File, Part One

By Alan Caruba

In July 2010 I wrote a commentary about Bisphenol-A, more commonly called BPA. It is a chemical that has been in wide, safe use for over 50 years, but has come under a horrendous and unrelenting attack by a variety of specious environmental and consumer groups.

Out of curiosity mostly, I initiated a Google Alert earlier this month to inform me whenever BPA was mentioned in a news story on the Web. Within three weeks I received 20 alerts, almost one a day, and each contained notifications on 15 – 25 different article references. That’s just nuts!

Why are Americans being bombarded in the space of a single month with more than 400 articles in magazines, newspapers, and on the Internet that are designed to frighten them into thinking that a good, safe thing is a bad thing?

It piqued my curiosity and prompted me to dig deeper. It seems that finding out who is behind these attacks on BPA, none of which has any credible science to support their claims, is proving to be a real detective game.

The result is that I have decided to follow the BPA story on a periodic basis in order to track and report how this classic scare campaign is maintained and spread. My research and writings will appear in “The BPA File”, a series that will ultimately be published on the website of The National Anxiety Center. It will appear monthly and elsewhere in places where readers have grown accustomed to seeing my writings.

I founded The National Anxiety Center in 1990 as a clearinghouse for information about just such scare campaigns and this fresh examination of BPA will be published alongside previous works including, “The Subversion of Education in America” and “The Enemies of Meat,” as well as the archive of commentaries written before I began my daily blog, “Warning Signs.”

The reason for this new series is that we have already seen any number of beneficial chemicals and products targeted in this fashion, often to be driven from the marketplace by class action lawsuits or banned by federal agencies and states.

Classic examples range from Alar and DDT to saccharine, all of which came under withering criticism from questionable sources using junk science, yet all of which have been proved over time to be perfectly safe and harmless when properly used. The same is happening today with BPA.

When the American Council on Science and Health, a consumer advocate group, listed “The Top Ten Unfounded Health Scares of 2010”, number one on its list was BPA. The ACSH wrote, “Bisphenol-A has been in use for over five decades in the manufacturing of certain life-saving medical devices as well as in baby and water bottles, dental devices, eyeglass lenses, DVDs and CDs and other electronics.”

BPA also plays an important role in maintaining a healthy food supply. “In addition,” said the ACSH, “it (BPA) has been used to coat the inside of nearly all metal food cans to protect consumers against deadly diseases like botulism.” If activists are successful in their pressure campaigns to ban BPA, my fear is that less-tested and less-safe alternatives will be forced upon unsuspecting consumers.

Here’s a simple question. If any of the charges against BPA are true, why then – in more than 50 year’s time! – has there been no direct connection drawn between BPA and the disease conditions claimed by anti-chemical activists? Answer: because none has ever been established through reliable scientific testing.

Human beings are chemical-processing machines. That’s what our bodies do all day, every day. We live longer, healthier lives precisely because of the discovery and use of chemicals, many of which exist solely to enhance our health and well-being.

Ultimately, as any chemist, pharmacist, or physician will tell you, “The poison is in the dose.” It is the amount of exposure and the route of exposure that determines whether something is harmful or not. Perhaps the best example of this ancient axiom is water. Too much and you can drown in it. Too little and you will suffer dehydration.

The same holds true for other chemicals, many of which are found in nature. Most crops produce their own pesticides to protect against natural predators and the human race has been ingesting trace elements of these chemicals since the dawn of humanity, along with the fruits and vegetables we know to be healthy elements of our diet. The amounts, however, are so miniscule – parts per billion – that they pose no threat.

This exact pattern exists with BPA as well; the so-called ‘endocrine disruptor’ we’re so breathlessly warned about in BPA is identical to a chemical found in soy products like tofu and soy sauce, soy milk and other related products. Strangely, we’re not hearing panicked cries to banish vegetarian food, Chinese carry-out and alternative dairy products for the lactose-intolerant from American society.

So, with Part One of The BPA File we shall begin an investigative journey that will, I promise, astonish you with the brazenness of a global campaign of lies intended to actually endanger your life by denying you the benefits of this particular chemical.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Why Billions of Bed Bugs are Biting

By Alan Caruba

After decades during which bed bugs were a rare event, they now make headlines infesting places from the Jersey City Goldman Sacks building to a Victoria’s Secret shop on New York’s Upper East Side, along with dormitories, apartments and homes throughout the nation

The bed bug explosion is more related to the loss of the means to exterminate them than the bugs themselves. The bed bugs are doing what all insect populations do; they are reproducing by the billions.

On August 10, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a “consumer alert” whose sole purpose was to continue its drumbeat of fear regarding any use of pesticides and to imply that pest control professionals could not be trusted to help one rid themselves of this ubiquitous pest.

All pest control professionals are subject to state licensing and annual certification to ensure they receive training in the proper methods of applying pesticides. Many firms conduct in-house training sessions year-round and the profession’s trade associations provide seminars as well. Suffice to say that everything about the provision of pest control services is highly regulated.

Since its founding in 1970, the EPA has dedicated itself to banning as many pesticides as possible. Its first “victory” was the banning of DDT in 1972. The result has been upwards of 90 million deaths from malaria worldwide. The truth is that DDT saved more lives than any chemical in human history until being banned from use in the U.S. and by other nations.

I have worked with the pest control industry for a quarter century and in the 1980s I helped promote an extraordinary pesticide, Ficam, a product that effectively killed a wide range of insect pests and was applied with nothing more dangerous than water!

After years of safe use, the EPA told the manufacturer that it had to re-register the product. Having previously spent around $15 million for the original registration, the British-owned company did the math and concluded it would be too expensive to go through the process again. It is no longer available in America.

The EPA’s action had nothing to do with the efficacy of the pesticide. It had everything to do with its unspoken policy of driving pesticides off the marketplace, whether for use by pest control professionals, for agricultural use, or by the general public.

And that is why America is experiencing a bed bug epidemic.

According to a joint statement on bed bug control from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the EPA, “Though the exact cause is not known, experts suspect the resurgence is associated with increased resistance of bed bugs to available pesticides…” and other causes such as greater international and domestic travel.

One pretty good guess at the “exact cause” is the continued loss of pesticides with which to knock down insect and rodent populations that nature provides in the billions.

In the “Bed Bug Handbook”, a guide for pest control professionals, “People often assume that any EPA-registered product that has bed bug treatment instructions on its label must be effective at controlling bed bugs. But this is not necessarily true. EPA policy is to rely on market forces to ensure that a product does what it claims; the agency does not require efficacy testing.”

The EPA and countless “environmental” organizations have effectively “educated” Americans to be afraid of chemicals in general and pesticides in particular. The claim is that they pose a threat to people’s health and this is true if one drinks them direct from the container. All poisons are based on the “dose”, the amount of exposure and, in the hands of a pest management professional, that factor will be very-low-to-none.

Today’s pest management professionals go about their job using the principles of Integrated Pest Management. High on the list is the least use of pesticides to knock down a pest population.

Ask yourself why, a hundred years before the invention and widespread use of pesticides, was an American’s average life span was about forty years of age? Given the use of pesticides, why do we now live up to eighty years? The answer is that pesticides protect lives and property too.

There is no real logic behind the EPA’s continued efforts to ban pesticides, but there is an illogical, unreasoned, and a lot of very dubious “science” behind the relentless effort to deprive Americans of the protection pesticides provide.

As I frequently remind people, take away the pesticides and all you have left is pests.

In the case of bed bugs, you have a particular pest that is very difficult to eliminate without a lot of intensive effort and the need to return to the scene of the infestation to get at those bed bugs that were hidden away between blood meals and will survive, become active, and lay eggs that become nymphs in a new generation to be exterminated.

It should come as no surprise that the joint CDC-EPA statement was heavy with warnings about “pesticide misuse” and “greater risk of pesticide exposure for those living in a home.”

The advice offered is laughable. It recommends using “monitoring devices” when most people learn about a bed bug infestation when they get bitten!

The statement recommends “removing clutter where bed bugs can hide”, “vacuuming”, and “using non-chemical pesticides (such as diatomaceous earth” and, finally, “judicious use of effective chemical pesticides” as the last choice.

The message is that it is the pesticides that are the problem, not the bed bugs. The reason we have seen a bed bug explosion is that the EPA has eliminated many of the pesticides that were formerly in use, creating the perfect storm, a growing resistance to those still registered for use.

The bed bugs don’t care that a generation or two of Americans have been brainwashed to think pesticides are bad, but you should.

© Alan Caruba, 2010