All this concern about toxins in plastic toys, baby bottles, breast milk, shampoos—is it partly the result of a bunch of worry-prone uber-moms worked up over exaggerated rumors and dubious science?

No way, reports Judith Shulevitz at The New Republic, who investigates “The Toxicity Panic” and ultimately finds that it’s not a panic at all but a rational response to real dangers. In fact, Shulevitz suggests that by and large, the mothers have been right:

When I first began my crash course on this subject, I assumed the reason quasi-eco-moms like me have spent the last half-decade fretting neurotically about the stuff our bodies come into contact with, rather than about the environment writ large—about what’s in our homes rather than in rivers and lakes and soil and air—is that we’re typical self-absorbed bourgeois parents. Now I know the real reason is that we can see inside our bodies better than ever before, and what we find there horrifies us.

Shulevitz reports that new biomonitoring technology has led to startling discoveries about toxins and their effect on humans, especially endocrine disruptors, the substances at the core of bisphenol-A health concerns. No longer is it always true that “the dose makes the poison,” as the longstanding and overly simplistic scientific bromide goes. Her article is a sobering summation of the current state of toxicity research and regulation—or, rather, the lack thereof.

Ultimately, Shulevitz admits a certain sense of vindication:

In the case of consumer products, if not vaccines, anxious, half-informed mothers like me had inklings about their toxicity that turned out to be justified, if not necessarily right in every detail. Meanwhile, as the tools for gauging the effects of toxicity have become more sophisticated, the previous generation of risk-assessment experts—with their narrow study parameters, insistence on dose-sensitivity, and smug theories about irrational lay people—are looking more and more wrong.

Source: The New Republic (full article available only to subscribers) 

Image by Kevin Krejci , licensed under Creative Commons .  

The FDA has announced that it will blow a third self-imposed deadline on bisphenol A—the end of 2009—further pushing back a ruling on whether the ubiquitous plastic food-packaging ingredient is safe. So it’s still up to consumers to decide on their own whether they should be concerned about the ingredient that’s in soups, juices, drinks, even drinking water and home-canning lids, and is suspected in a wide range of health issues.

At the Reno News & Review, Kat Kerlin writes about her experience in attempting a weeklong BPA-free diet. Six months pregnant, she finds it pretty much impossible to eliminate BPA from her life during the exercise, and she ultimately falls off the BPA-free wagon with a thud. Her chronicle is well worth reading for anyone attempting to live by the precautionary principle.

Meanwhile, take it from the key federal official in charge of studying BPA: Do your best to avoid the stuff. Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program, put it pretty clearly to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “Asked if consumers should be worried about BPA, Birnbaum said, ‘Absolutely.’”

The Journal Sentinel reports that in testimony before a Senate panel in early December, Birnbaum compared BPA to lead, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls, “all of which have been found to have devastating health effects even at low doses.” Her agency, the NIEHS, is spending $30 million in the next two years on BPA research.

BPA is just one ingredient widely used in plastics that has suspected or known damaging health effects, Environment Yale points out in “The Problem With Plastics” in its Fall 2009 issue. And the controversy surrounding BPA is just part of a larger social-political-environmental-medical debate that we’ll be having as we reform our nation’s ill-conceived toxic substances policy, largely embodied in the Toxic Substances Control Act.

“On the regulatory side, we’re in a hole, and it’ll take us a long time to dig ourselves out,” John Wargo, a Yale professor of environmental policy, political science, and risk analysis, tells Environment Yale. “Until that happens, it’s like the Wild West. The public bears the risks of exposure, and the public has to decide how to avoid them.”

Environment Yale helps out by publishing a sidebar with Wargo’s tips on avoiding toxins in your life, from his eye-opening new book Green Intelligence: Creating Environments that Protect Human Health (Yale University Press).

Sources: Reno News & Review, Science & Environmental Health Network, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Environment Yale

Photo illustration by Don Button. Image courtesy of Reno News & Review.

The lumbering Food and Drug Administration is finally showing signs that it may take action on bisphenol A, better known as BPA. The FDA announced yesterday that it is reviewing new studies of the chemical and expects to rule by November 30 on whether BPA is safe for food and beverage containers, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

That’s too slow for some activists, such as scientist Olga Naidenko of the Environmental Working Group, which has long fought for a BPA ban. The FDA is “working to stall science rather than advance it,” she tells the newspaper.

But other observers such as Liz Hitchcock, a lobbyist with the Public Interest Research Group, “were heartened that the FDA was taking another look,” writes the Journal Sentinel.

The Milwaukee paper has been on top of the story for a while, having published an investigative series about BPA and other pervasive household chemicals. Among other angles, the stories have called out the FDA for relying on studies financed by the plastics industry and dug up e-mails showing collusion between FDA scientists and lobbyists for BPA makers in writing safety guidelines. This is the kind of invaluable investigative journalism that’s fast disappearing.

The FDA’s review will include more than 100 new studies.

Sources: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Environmental Working Group, Public Interest Research Group

Check your plastic water bottle and cut down your canned-food consumption: The chemical bisphenol A, better known as BPA, may be even more pervasive and dangerous than scientists thought. Science News reports on several new studies that point to further harmful health effects. Here’s a rundown of the findings:

Pregnant mice exposed to BPA suffered an irreversible change in one of the “master regulatory genes” of fertility, suggesting the same may happen to humans.

Rat hearts exposed to BPA along with estrogen were more prone to life-threatening arrhythmia, pointing to an elevated danger for premenopausal women.

A study of Harvard undergraduates found that students drinking out of polycarbonate bottles showed a much more immediate rise in BPA than expected.

Another study indicated that there are likely major sources of BPA contamination in our environment other than food, and that BPA may temporarily collect in body fat and slowly empty into the blood.

All in all, the new research makes a case for avoiding BPA whenever possible—and gives you some convincing talking points if you know anyone who still scoffs when you point out that they’re drinking from a BPA-laced water bottle. I hope the FDA, which still remarkably claims that BPA is safe, catches up with the science soon.

For tips on how to avoid BPA, see this post on Treehugger—but be aware, as the Winnipeg Free Press recently reported, that even bottles marketed as “BPA-free” sometimes contain the chemical.

(Thanks, Yahoo! Green.)

Source: Science News

UPDATE 8/18/09: Ask and you shall receive: The FDA just announced a new review of BPA research and expects to rule on its findings by November 30.

Image by  pasukaru76 , licensed under  Creative Commons .