What the Chemical Industry Doesn't Want You to Know about Everyday Products

Note from Health Lover, Ilena Rosenthal:
http://ilenarose.blogspot.com

The chemical industry long ago hired pseudo science writer for hire,
Stephen "I'll Sue You if you Disagree With Me" Barrett ... via their
many quack front groups such as:
acsh.org
ncahf.org
quackwatch.com
junkscience.com

On Usenet, Barrett's parrots such as listed in this group (and their
Snake-oil Wannabe, Myrl "Call me Will Ketcher" Jeffcoat) have reposted
chemical industry propaganda for years.
www.BreastImplantAwareness.org/snake-oil.htm
www.BreastImplantAwareness.org/myrl.html



What the Chemical Industry Doesn't Want You to Know about Everyday
Products

By Elaine Shannon, AlterNet
Posted on September 15, 2008, Printed on September 15, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/98809/

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."

The Missouri scientists redoubled their investigations of BPA and
churned out more evidence of low-dose BPA toxicity to the reproductive
systems of test animals. Industry officials and scientist allies fired
back, sometimes in nose-to-nose debates at scientific gatherings,
sometimes more insidiously.

"I heard [chemical industry officials] were making blatantly false
statements about our research," says Welshons. "They were skilled at
creating doubt when none existed."

On at least one occasion, the industry tried to mute Vom Saal's
increasingly insistent voice. In 2001, according to three
knowledgeable sources, a representative of the American Chemistry
Council, the industry trade group, called an official at the
Washington-based Society for Women's Health Research (SWHR) to urge
that Vom Saal be barred from the dais at an upcoming convocation at
Stanford University. Society scientific director Sherry Martz says the
industry spokesman objected to Vom Saal's appearance at the
prestigious event on grounds that his work was "very controversial,
and not everybody believes what he's saying."

"Our response," says Martz, "was no."



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."

But the industry's increasingly noisy denials backfired. Scientists
surge toward burning questions the way news crews chase hurricanes. 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."

In 2006, Hunt joined Vom Saal, Welshons and 36 other international BPA
experts at a conclave sponsored by the National Institutes of
Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a Chapel Hill, N.C.-based arm
of the National Institutes of Health. In August 2007, the so-called
Chapel Hill panel issued a "consensus statement" asserting that, as
Vom Saal puts it, "particularly for infants but also for adults, there
is an extensive body of evidence from animals that should be taken as
a very serious warning that human health is being placed at risk due
to the current level of exposure of humans to BPA."

Earlier this month, the National Toxicology Program, an interagency
body that assesses human toxins for the federal government, accepted
much of the Chapel Hill panel's thinking and took the position that
while more research is necessary, low doses of BPA may affect
"development of the prostate gland and brain and [cause] behavioral
effects in fetuses, infants and children." (Unlike the
academic-dominated Chapel Hill panel, the NTP found the BPA threat to
adults "negligible.")

The influential NTP assessment directly contradicted the federal Food
and Drug Administration's stance that BPA-laden food packaging is
safe, even for babies and children. Under pressure from a growing
number of health and consumer advocates, lawmakers and scientists, an
FDA advisory panel is scheduled to meet Sept.16 to take testimony
about whether BPA should be reassessed in terms of food safety, a move
that could lead to an end to BPA-laced food packaging.

The chemical industry can expected to fight aggressively against more
regulation. Earlier this year, the industry spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars to defeat a California legislative proposal to
ban BPA in food packaging. The Chemistry Council and allied companies
and industry groups hired an army of lobbyists, including Navigators
LLC,the Washington firm that ran Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2003
campaign and his 2004 budget reform drive. Tactics included an
industry email to food banks charging that a BPA ban would mean the
end of distributions of canned goods for the poor.

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.

"Considerable funding has been diverted away from basic and biomedical
research since the Iraq war started," says University of Texas-Austin
endocrinologist Andrea C. Gore. "It's a very sad time in science." By
some estimates, the NIH now funds only 10 to 15 percent of grant
applications for biomedical research. "More than 85 percent of grant
applications are rejected," says Gore, "an unacceptably low level that
is causing scientists to have to cut back or even abandon their
research programs."

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.

Elaine Shannon is an investigative editor with the Environmental
Working Group.