Scaring Mothers and All Others - The BPA File, Part Four

By Alan Caruba

In a revealing article in the April issue of The Atlantic, “Beyond BPA: Could ‘BPA-Free’ Products Be Just as Unsafe?” the effort to scare American consumers and others around the world comes full circle. In essence, the people and organizations behind campaigns to ban bisphenol-A (BPA) and anything made from plastic exist to frighten everyone about everything.

From the snake oil salesmen who pitched their phony medicines in the days of the early West to today’s purveyors of fear about a wide range of chemicals that protect health and extend life, the key element remains the same; they lie to enrich themselves.

As John Entine wrote in an article, “Scared to Death”, “When it comes to stories on so-called toxic substances, the public discourse seems infected by a malady worse than microscopic residues: chemophobia.”

“Webster’s defines chemophobia as the irrational belief that ‘chemicals’ are bad and ‘natural’ things are good. Labeling a chemical ‘toxic’ or a ‘contaminant’ is meaningless. Toxicity is a question of degree, exposure is different from effect.”

In plain terms, our bodies are designed to process and excrete all manner of things we breathe or ingest. Our bodies are, in fact, chemical factories that produce chemicals to protect and maintain their functions while, at the same time, removing what it does not require.

A massive campaign has been underway for several years to demonize bisphenol-A, BPA, a chemical in use for more than 50 years to line cans and plastic containers for the precise purpose of protecting their contents against contamination up to and including botulism, a lethal food-borne disease.

One might think that more than a half-century of its use without any evidence that it poses any harm would be sufficient to support its use, but liars who defame BPA are catering to other, more sinister agendas and fear is the means they use to advance them.

In a lengthy analysis available on Junkscience.com, it is noted that “BPA is one of the best tested substances” and has “been evaluated by regulatory bodies around the world” that found that:

• BPA is not carcinogenic or mutagenic

• BPA does not adversely effect reproduction or development at any realistic dose

• BPA shows weak estrogenic effects only at extremely high dose levels never reached in daily life

• BPA is efficiently ‘metabolized’ and rapidly excreted after oral exposure.

A primary target for the scare campaigns waged against BPA are women and, in particular, pregnant woman and mothers of infants. The product most targeted is plastic baby bottles.

Countless articles have been published in magazines, newspapers, and on Internet sites and blogs devoted to “environmental” topics and health issues that “report” various clinical studies all purporting that BPA represents a great risk to women.

Women unfamiliar with the scientific process are particularly vulnerable to reports that a small study of few females “may” or “could” or “might” reflect a connection between BPA and the alleged results, particularly if they are reported in medical journals that routinely publish such studies. The language of such studies is always couched in vague terminality such as indications of a “strong association” with the condition cited. In real life terms, this is meaningless.

Other reports exhibit both ignorance and bias such as a Huffington Post article that asserted “There’s no ‘Safe’ Plastic, Already!” Such a claim is absurd on its face. Lacking any basis in fact, the author claimed that “the latest science shows that plastics are really, really bad news” ignoring the fact that plastic containers of food and drink are ubiquitous. The claim itself sounds like it came from an ignorant child.

The sheer numbers involving plastic bottles should indicate their use is safe. For example, nine billion gallons of bottled water are sold every year in the United States. That’s 50 billion bottles. If they posed a health threat, it would be evident, but they do not, nor do the huge numbers of baby bottles, but expectant and new mothers are repeatedly told they should be avoided, especially by manufacturers who trumpet the news they do not use BPA.

A report in the Los Angeles Times claimed that eating canned food poses a health threat, repeating the tired and extensively disputed claims about BPA. The study, however, was released by two environmental groups that thrive on scare campaigns, the Breast Cancer Fund and the Silent Spring Institute. Out of hundreds of thousands of families in the U.S., the study was based on just five!

What is not reported is the fact that modern science can detect infinitesimal amounts of any chemical substance and it is the fact that they are so small that means they represent no threat. As always, it is the amount of exposure that determines hazard and mere “trace” amounts that can only be detected in a laboratory represent a phantom hazard.

In the end, telling new mothers and everyone else that they should not eat or drink anything from a can or bottle protected by BPA is, in fact, to put them, their babies, and everyone else at a far greater risk.

Editor's Note: Parts One through Three of The BPA File are available on the "Warning Signs" blog.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Christmas Kill-Joys

By Alan Caruba

I would like to reserve a special place in Hell for those people who, every year, issue warnings about “toxic toys” and thus add to every parent’s concerns additional worries about anything and everything they purchase for their children.

I was reminded of this when my local daily devoted a full page, plus scary cartoon illustrations, to the claims of a group in Michigan, the Ecology Center, citing an alleged threat from plastic toys that include the use of phthalates and other “chemicals” that will surely kill every child who receives one.

Here’s what the American Chemistry Council says about phthalates: “Most phthalates are used to make vinyl soft and flexible. From their use in medical devices to toys to cars to homes, flexible vinyl products help make our lives better and safer. And in hospitals and emergency rooms, they help save lives.” Such products are “high-performing and cost effective; their performance is difficult or impossible to match with competitive substitutes.”

The Council further notes that “Safety reviews by European and American scientific panels have specifically cleared phthalates for use in toys and in nail polish,” adding that “No governmental review has found any phthalate unsafe as used in products for the general public.”

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act will, as of next year, ban phthalates. Never mind the findings of scientific panels. Never mind the oldest principle of toxicology that it is the “dose”, the amount of any chemical or substance that determines whether it is unsafe, whether it is a poison or not. If you consumed too much salt, sugar or water, it would kill you.

There is, to my knowledge, no evidence whatever that phthalates have caused injury or death to anyone.

Do you know what actually kills children? From one to four years of age, the leading cause is “accidents”, followed by “developmental and genetic conditions that were present at birth", then cancer, also largely genetic-related. From age 15 through 24, the leading causes are “accidents” followed by homicide and suicide!

Consumers are being victimized by their own lack of knowledge about the use of chemicals while, at the same time, benefiting in countless ways from them. Pharmaceuticals, too, are “chemicals” that bring relief and recovery from all manner of illness and injury.

Plastic, a derivative of oil, has so enhanced our lives one could write a multi-volume history of how its use has been a benefit.

The problem is that the enviro-crazies don’t care about improving our lives. They are determined to deny humanity the benefits of modern life, returning us all to earlier times when epidemics swept over whole populations and destroyed them.

We are, as the expression goes, being nibbled to death by little duckies. A ban on DDT, a ban on phthalates, a ban on harvesting timber, a ban on irrigation to save some minor specie of fish, a ban on extracting oil from a tiny part of a vast wildlife reserve or of the thousands of miles of our continental shelf, attacks on “dirty” coal or “dangerous” nuclear power for our electricity needs, a proposed “emissions” tax on ranchers for every single cow, pig, sheep, and other livestock and poultry, and the list just keeps growing and growing.

Environmentalism has everything to do with its own perverted religion of protest and nothing to do with reality. Meanwhile, we find ourselves the victims of politicians who no longer care, nor bother to understand—if they ever could—the science of the issues. These are the same people who have destroyed the U.S. housing market and set in motion another Recession.

Much of the fear that Americans and others around the world endure is fed by the worldwide environmental movement with its locus in the United Nations. Its sole commodity is the generation of irrational fears.