Bogus Sex Scares Used to Ban BPA - The BPA File, Part Five

By Alan Caruba

Over the course of the first four elements of The BPA File, we have documented a massive, global campaign to ban bisphenol-A, BPA, a chemical that has been safely used for more than a half century to protect metal and plastic containers for food and liquid against spoilage and the resulting hazard to health.

Every day, somewhere in the nation and the world, there is a constant repetition of lies regarding BPA They frequently target the fears of mothers of newborn infants, but also allege a wide variety of other health threats including a healthy sex life for men and women.

In the same fashion that the global warming hoax was spread and maintained by a campaign that asserted that everything from frizzy hair to blizzards was the result of a dramatic warming cycle that was either happening or predicted to happen, the effort to ban BPA uses the same technique.

The campaign is pursued by a coalition of environmental and consumer activist groups that depend on such scare campaigns to maintain funding and secure members who can be relied upon to ignore or reject the science that disputes such campaigns.

In May 2011, the Miami Herald published what read like a news release by the Natural Resources Defense Council that asserted “Bisphenal-A associated with obesity, lower sperm counts, and pre-cancerous changes in the body is found in the bodies of 90 percent of Americans. Now a study shows that you can halve your levels of BPA and other chemicals within three days through a change in diet.”

Three distinct “scares” are captured in this news release, all aimed a fears regarding health, but none of them reflect the fact that trace amounts of BPA is routinely excreted and thus poses no threat. It also fails to reveal that the “studies” always involve administering large amounts of BPA to laboratory mice in a fashion that does not reflect actual exposure.

The ultimate target of the anti-BPA campaign is the widespread use of plastic containers of food and liquids, along with its use to line the insides of metal cans for that purpose.

From its earliest origins, environmentalists have sought to ban chemicals in general even though plastic has transformed and enhanced life around the world. In the U.S., the average life expectancy in the last century rose from thirty-seven in 1900 to the current seventy-eight years!

Earlier this year, the German Society of Toxicology released a review of more than five thousand previous studies of BPA exposure that concluded that BPA “exposure represents no noteworthy risk to the health of the human population, including newborns and babies.” Researchers concluded that BPA is neither mutagenic nor likely to be a carcinogen.

This, however, has not deterred the constant repetition of lies asserting that BPA is a health threat, nor a variety of efforts, including proposed State bans on the use of BPA. In April 2011, the Competitive Enterprise Institute released a 14-page report that included three pages of intensely documented notes, that refuted efforts by the Maryland legislature to ban infant formula and baby food packaging that contains more than 0.5 parts per billion (ppb) of BPA.

“In public policy, bad ideas have an unfortunate tendency to spread,” said Dr. Angela Logomasini, PhD. Efforts in Maine, Maryland, and even in Congress to ban BPA portend a host of food-born diseases and even death if such bans continue to be enacted.

The source of these bans is the environmental movement that first came to public notice when they succeeded in getting DDT banned. The result has been a rise in malarial deaths in nations that followed suit and in the swift explosion of the bed bug plague in the U.S.

So vast have been the campaigns against the beneficial chemicals that protect human health that a word was coined to identify the phenomenon—chemophobia. It is an irrational fear of chemicals when, in fact, the human body is a chemical factory, producing chemicals for digestion, hormones, and others, all the while cleaning the body of chemicals it rejects.

Simple common sense suggests that parts-per-billion of any substance cannot possibly pose a risk or threat.

In his book, “The Precautionary Principle: A Critical Appraisal of Environmental Risk Assessment”, published by the Cato Institute, author Indur M. Goklany, wrote “In keeping with its origins of technological skepticism, the precautionary principle has also been increasingly invoked as justification, among other things, for international controls, if not outright bans, on various technologies, which—despite substantial benefits to humanity and, in some cases to certain aspects of the environmental—could worsen other aspects of the environment or public health.”

At the heart of environmentalism is the core belief that humans are endangering the Earth by the use of the remarkable technologies that have been developed in the past century.

That is why, by spreading lies about sperm counts, endocrine disruption, and non-existent threats to infants and adults via plastic and metal containers of food and liquids, the ultimate agenda to reduce the worldwide human population is central to the campaign against the use of BPA.

There are no feasible substitutes for BPA. Banning it will guarantee the people will die.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Warning! Just About Everything Will Kill You

By Alan Caruba

According to a new book, “The Healthy Home”, every single room in your home or apartment is lethal. You would be better off living in a tent in the woods somewhere as far as the authors are concerned.

Among the life-threatening hazards is the need to remove your shoes before entering your home to avoid walking around “unwittingly in car oil, pesticides, animal waste” and other “toxins.”

And did you know that “non-stick pots and pans release potential hazardous fumes and particles into the air such as toxic gases, carcinogens, and global pollutants”? Cook a meal and die!

And, please, get rid of those wrinkle-free sheets because they can “expose you to the chemical PFC (perfluorochemicals)” that are “linked to reproductive and development toxicity, as well as cancers of the bladder and liver.” There you are, getting what you think is a good night’s sleep and, instead, you’re under attack by your sheets!

This hideous book goes on to explain why fluorescent light bulbs “will make you feel drained and lethargic” and “electrical appliances create EMF’s (electromagnetic fields).”

It’s not just one book. There’s “Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” We are informed that “From bug spray, to ‘tuna salad, the new lead paint’, to her own deck made of pressure-treated wood (which contains the carcinogen—and developmental neurotoxicant—arsenic)”, the author goes off on a paranoid bender.

As we all know, everything is an environmental crisis. Air! Water! Fossil fuels! Nuclear energy! Food! If you believe Al Gore, the seas are rising, the poles are melting, and we just have to reduce carbon dioxide, a gas upon which all life (along with oxygen) depends.

Those of my generation enjoy sending around lists of things we did when we were growing up in the 1930s and 40s. They remind us that we slept in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-base paints, there were no childproof lids on medicine bottles, and when we rode our bikes we did not wear helmets.

We ate cupcakes, cookies, white bread, real butter, and bacon. We did not have play stations, Nintendo’s and video games, or televisions with 150 channels. This list goes on, but the point is that, unless it was raining, we were outside playing! We got tons of exercise, lots of sunshine, and no one was constantly warning us against everything, real or imagined, that could kill us except against playing in the street. And we did that, too.

Life Expectancy at All-Time High

So what are we to make of the latest news that says that life expectancy in the United States is at an all-time high?

The latest report from the Centers for Disease Control says that, in 2009, life expectancy exceeded 78 years for the first time ever. When my Father was born in 1901, life expectancy was 47.3 years. He lived to age 93. Mother lived to 98!

How insane are all those people producing research study reports like a recent one from Wageningen University in the Netherlands noting that insects produce far less greenhouse gases than cattle and pigs do, and would be “a viable alternative to eating meat”? That’s right—the Greens want you to start eating bugs to save the Earth.

The latest big scare is nuclear radiation from the Japanese nuclear reactors, the result of the biggest earthquake to hit that nation in years. In the U.S., you will get more radiation just getting a suntan in your backyard this summer.

It may not kill you, but a $14 trillion debt may kill the economy of the United States if Congress doesn’t get around to cutting the insane waste of money the government spends every day such as the $60 million that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is giving three public universities, $20 million each, in Florida, Iowa, and Idaho to study the “impact that global warming will have” on crops and forests? Only there is NO global warming. The Earth has been in a perfectly natural COOLING cycle since 1998.

I am all for a healthy lifestyle. Too much of anything is likely to be bad for you, but the odds are that you are among the millions of Americans who will live to age 78 and well beyond.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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

Destroying the Credibility of Science

By Alan Caruba

Back in 1990 when I founded The National Anxiety Center as a clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns” designed to influence public opinion and policy, I was mainly concerned about the torrent of lies about global warming.

Their beginning is usually dated to an appearance by James E. Hansen before a congressional committee in 1988 in which he claimed that global warming would destroy the earth. To this day Hansen heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has held that position since 1981. There is no rational reason why he continues to be employed by the U.S. government.

Global warming has been widely discredited thanks to the November 2009 release of thousands of emails between UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “scientists” that revealed their collusion to rig the data that supported the fraud.

GLOBAL WARMING. Climate alarmists are already worrying that the public has grown so tired of their idiotic claims that huge blizzards are caused by “warming” they are beginning to pour money into the education of a new generation of “environmental journalists” to ensure that more such lies make it to the front page of your daily newspaper or via other media.

Meanwhile, billions of taxpayer’s dollars have been flushed down the federal government rat hole to fund “research” guaranteed to support the hoax. It gets worse. Despite the defeat of the Cap-and-Trade bill based on the Big Lie that carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases cause global warming, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is attempting an end-run around Congress to impose limits on the carbon dioxide emissions of utilities and every form of manufacturing and business in America.

The EPA is engaged in a perversion of science, but what else is new? Americans have been ill-served by the alphabet soup of government agencies supposedly in place to protect the food we eat, medicines we take, the air and the water. In the process they are just as often stripping Americans of the protection afforded by pharmaceuticals and beneficial chemicals.

VACCINES v. AUTISM. A case in point is an article in the British Medical Journal that “accused a disgraced British doctor of committing an ‘elaborate fraud’ by faking data in his studies linking vaccines with autism.”

The result of that fraud was to convince thousands, if not millions, of parents that vaccines to protect their children against measles and mumps were a threat to their health. The ancillary question is why Andrew Wakefield’s paper was published in 1998. Science journals are expected to peer review such papers and determine if the data presented is valid. If it cannot be reproduced, it fails that test.

DDT. Starting in 1972, an EPA ban essentially ended its use anywhere in the nation and other nations followed suit. A year later a court upheld the EPA and that is an object lesson in what happens when matters of science are decided by men and women, lawyers, with no training or background in science. The DDT hoax continues to cause malaria deaths, particularly in Africa and mostly affecting women and children.

The U.S. is experiencing an outbreak of the bed bug population, eliminated decades ago, because the EPA has banned or limited the use of virtually every pesticide to exterminate them.

ALAR. Recall, too, the fraud perpetrated by environmental groups against Alar, a chemical that was widely used by apple growers to ensure that the crop would ripen in a fashion that permitted an efficient harvest. The Alar hoax cost American apple growers millions in lost revenue until it became known that Alar posed no health threat whatever.

SACCHARINE. Though cleared of charges dating from the 1980s that saccharin was a cancer-causing substance, it took until the 1990s to get it removed from the 9th edition of the “Report on Carcinogens” and it took until mid-December 2010 for the EPA to finally admit what everyone knew by then. You can thank “consumer” groups for foisting this fraud on everyone and agencies of the U.S. government for maintaining it until they no longer could.

BPA. A similar campaign exists to ban BPA, bisphenol-A, a chemical used to line plastic bottles and containers. It is literally a worldwide effort and it too is without any scientific merit. In the same way the claim that linked vaccines and autism, BPA is under attack, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. I have written about this in the past and intend to follow this to demonstrate how these “scientific” frauds debase all science in the process.

Aside from the fact that these claims always begin with a dubious “scientific” study and then escalate as other “scientists” climb on the funding bandwagon, the other element is always the role that the mainstream media plays in keeping the fraud alive until the sheer weight of evidence makes it impossible to do so.

Ultimately, this destroys the trust we normally accord to legitimate scientists, exhausting our ability and willingness to embrace the science that has prolonged and protected the lives of millions.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

When Bad Science Makes Bad Laws

By Alan Caruba

You may have noticed that the mainstream media has virtually dropped “global warming” as a topic worth reporting. That can be traced to “Climategate”, the November 2009 leak of emails that revealed the global hoax perpetrated on us by a small group of scientists who had been generating false information about the non-event that is climate.

Billions of dollars have been wasted on “research” about what amounts to the greatest fraud in the modern era. It is essential to bear in mind that the baseless claim of Earth burning up has been created in the United Nations Environmental Program and is supported by millions of dollars in propaganda from leading environmental organizations.

The public has become increasingly reluctant to be stampeded by specious scientific claims and with good reason; the science cited has often been false. Yet what we saw with global warming is repeating itself, this time with the plastics additive bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical used to harden plastic and has been in wide consumer use for more than half a century. It is used to improve the safety and reliability of everything from DVDs and consumer electronics to sports safety equipment and shatterproof bottles.

BPA is among the most tested chemicals in history and not a single study has ever shown any harm to humans under normal consumer use and exposure. Yet junk scientists have generated enough false or misleading data to prompt lawmakers and regulators to propose and pass bad laws based on this bad science.

A current case in point is Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) who is trying to impose a ban on BPA in applications involving contact with food. The chemical is widely used in the epoxy that lines food cans to improve safety by helping prevent food borne illness, as well as some baby bottles. The problem is her political agenda isn’t supported by sound science. Furthermore, there is no replacement for BPA in can linings and whatever is eventually used will be far less tested for safety, thereby increasing health risks for consumers.

Political pressure has led to BPA ban efforts in New York, Massachusetts and California. Several other states and municipalities have already enacted such bans, all of which were passed on the basis of politics rather than science.

The claim is that BPA poses a health threat, particularly to infants and children up to the age of three. Voting for anything that allegedly “protects” children may be good politics, but in the case of BPA, it is bad science and, worse, risky to human health and bad for the economy when you consider how many containers rely on this chemical to ensure their contents do not spoil.

This issue has been raised in Europe as well and scientists on the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) evaluated more than 800 studies on the topic, including one that was the basis for a partial BPA ban in Denmark. But after reviewing the science, the EFSA concluded that there is no evidence of harm from BPA and no evidence of neurobehavioral effects, even for infants and small children.

Such studies are normally conducted on laboratory rats, including a large independent study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Earl Gray at the EPA laboratory in North Carolina applied his 30 years of experience to the question and in doing so he and his colleagues failed to find any discernable adverse effects in the rats or their offspring, despite claims that BPA disrupted endocrines in humans.

Rats in these studies were unaffected even when they were fed doses several thousand times higher than the maximum exposure that could be experienced by humans. The methodology in such experiments has been around a very long time and is well established. Opponents of such studies – all of which show no demonstrable effect – usually fall back on claiming that the rats used were “insensitive” to BPA. That is rubbish.

The bogus BPA fears have also been debunked by Professor Richard Sharpe, a senior scientist at the Center for Reproductive Biology in Edinburgh, Scotland. In April he published an opinion dismissing the oft-heard propagandistic claims that “The science is clear and the findings are just not scary, but horrific,” and that feeding an infant from a shatterproof baby bottle is like giving a baby a birth control pill.

“This statement,” wrote Prof. Sharpe, “is not only wrong, it is a complete misrepresentation of what the scientific facts show.” Addressing the issue of the difference between the female sex hormone, ethinyl oestradiol, and BPA, Sharpe wrote, “You need at least 10,000 times as much bisphenol A as you do ethinyl oestradiol to have a similar oestrogenic potency.”

“There is accurate data on how much bisphenol A we ingest every day and it is at least 50,000 times less than the level needed to make this the equivalent of taking a contraceptive pill,” wrote Sharpe. “In fact, it is less still, because not much of the bisphenol A we ingest ever gets into the blood to cause any effect in the body.”

In 1990 I founded The National Anxiety Center as a clearinghouse to debunk “scare campaigns” designed to influence public opinion and public policy.” Laws are public policy and passing bad laws on BPA based on bad science costs the American public billions of dollars that we can ill-afford to spend.

The claims against BPA have been proven wrong in America and in Europe, but venial politicians and the groups supporting them have not given up the fight. It does not matter how many states pass bans. Either we insist on good science as opposed to the machinations of scare mongers and the politicians they enlist, or we shall continue to suffer the loss of scarce tax dollars and valuable chemicals that enhance our lives in countless ways.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

How to Spot "Green Talk"

By Alan Caruba

Aside from the idiotic claims that environmentalists like Al Gore regularly make to justify their various scams and schemes, anyone who has devoted any time to reading the huge volume of lies they put forth begins to notice the constant use of what I call “Green talk.”

I am hardly alone in this and a friend of mine, Rich Kozlovich, has actually made a list of favorite phrases he identifies as the weasel-words and phrases Greens favor. With his permission, I will share some of it.

In no particular order, if you read or hear any of the following, it is a warning sign that there is little proof to support whatever is being claimed:

Might cause
Could cause
Studies suggest
Linked to
Voiced concerns about
Expressed some concern
Experts fear
The long term effects are unknown
Negligible concern is still expressed about X
Minimal concerns
Still leaves doubts
Some scientists were critical
Researchers hypothesize
Suspected hormonal imbalance
Many scientists say
Still, some environmental substances remain suspicious
May make women more likely to
Probably to blame
Ecologists are worried that
Has the potential to significantly promote
Factors suggest
There is a serious connection to
Mounting evidence that these chemicals "may trigger hormonal changes"
Contrary to the overwhelming impression conveyed by scientists and politicians
Scientists say or science says

Phrases that are commonly used to arouse fear include the following:

Could be causing neurological and behavior effects in unborn babies and young children

Data is yet inadequate to make a judgment, however the weight of the evidence says we have a problem

Government scientists cautioned that their finding is highly preliminary because of the small number of women and children involved and lack of evidence from other studies.

We've used a new research technology to generate hypotheses and possible associations

While further study is needed to understand the impact, it is unlikely (or likely) that

While voicing caution on the link to (X), concerns were widespread that, if left unregulated, (X) could hurt the environment.

The simple truth is that the way we allow chemicals to be used in society today means we are performing a vast experiment, not in the lab, but in the real world, not just on wildlife but on people

Hogwash!

You can read Kozlovich’s entire commentary here.

In 1990 I founded The National Anxiety Center as a clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns” designed to influence public opinion and policy. Its website is an archive of some of my writings over the years.

The sheer volume of bogus claims has required me to blog daily to debunk the many manifestations of Green talk to advance nutty and dangerous campaigns such as a “global warming” that involves destroying our economy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Much of what passes for environmentalism is entirely fear-based and, as such, exists to hide a political agenda to use government at all levels from the federal to the local to enact laws and regulations that require people to take actions that, as often as not, lack any scientific, economic, or civic justification.

To make matters worse, they often come with unnecessary and wasteful costs. It is a deception to distract you from the actual purpose; to control over your life and your choices.

It is snake oil. Don’t buy it.

© Alan Caruba, 2010