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3-D model of plastic additive bisphenol A (source: Wikipedia)
We’ve seen a number of reports indicating that plastic additive bisphenol A is bad for humans; all of BPA’s effects on humans are still not fully itemized or understood and are still under study. (There’s enough data for the Canadian government to label BPA toxic, though.)
But a recent article from the Independent-UK regarding recently released findings encourages readers to extrapolate too much information about BPA.
The article reports on a study based on 514 factory workers in China, concluding that BPA exposure reduces semen quality. The exposures these workers faced could be completely off the map in terms of quantity, and the same workers could also have been exposed to many other hazards — like the benzene spill in the Songhua River in 2005. The article doesn’t say if the workers were all from one plant or several, nor does it say whether the workers tested were in the chemical or plastics industry or in other industries.
The other problem with this article is that there could be a re-hash of information from two other studies led by the same doctor, reported widely last year.
There’s more info in this report on the first of the three studies here:
Workplace BPA Exposure Increases Risk Of Male Sexual Dysfunction
ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2009) — High levels of workplace exposure to Bisphenol-A may increase the risk of reduced sexual function in men, according to a Kaiser Permanente study appearing in the journal Human Reproduction
This 2009 article indicates the first study was based on data from 634 factory workers — this time the article does say that they tested people in “BPA manufacturing facilities” (note the plural form) and a control group “where no BPA was present.”
I’m a little skeptical about three concurrent five-year studies with groups ranging from 417 to 634 in number; it seems like a lot being done by the same folks at the same time, but I don’t have any feel for whether this is typical or not.
The big news story buried inside both this Independent-UK article and in the year-old ScienceDaily article is that the Center for Disease Control’s U.S. National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health is funding studies on Chinese citizens in China based.
What the…? Would anybody care to explain why U.S. tax dollars are testing BPA exposures in China and not here on U.S. workers?
63 Comments
The Obama Administration has also surrendered to the Corporations on this issue. Obama always surrenders to his corporate masters. Poisoning children and adults, is still permitted by the FDA. Oh wait it is too hard for the FDA to protect Americans from toxic pollution. The corporations win. The Neo-con Trojan Horse Obama appeases polluters.
—”Since then the FDA has agreed with the National Toxicology Program that “some concern” exists about the effects of BPA on fetuses, infants and young children, and said it would work on further research on BPA while supporting industry efforts to replace or minimize BPA use. While companies quickly transitioned to BPA-free water bottles, there has been slower and less action on replacing BPA in the epoxy liners of metal cans.
The FDA also noted that due to federal law, it has little oversight of BPA, saying that banning specific uses of BPA could be a lengthy process and advocated for moving to a framework approach that would let it take quicker action on BPA.”—
Well, that’s what’s so weird about these three studies. You’d think corporations would already be up in arms about studies that were conducted on workers who likely have far worse exposures than U.S. workers since the studies would make BPA look very bad.
What else is going on with this study which we can’t monitor, over which we have little oversight? What keeps the Chinese government from getting involved in some way?
These studies may be genuine science, but how would we know, with the Obama Administration lying to protect oil companies and chemical companies. They do not protect the American people. Scientific research has long ago proven BPAs, which are hormone disrupters, toxic. The Canadian government has officially determined that Bis Phenol A, is toxic.
—–The primary health concerns center on BPA’s potential effects as an endocrine disrupter, which can mimic or interfere with the body’s natural hormones and potentially damage development, especially of young children.
“Our science indicated that Bisphenol A may be harmful to both human health and the environment and we were the first country to take bold action in the interest of Canadians,” Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq said in a statement.—-
“What the…? Would anybody care to explain why U.S. tax dollars are testing BPA exposures in China and not here on U.S. workers?”
It’s because China will soon become our unquestioned lord and master, considering the amount of money the US owes them.
I know…late reply, but anyway:
By doing the study offshore, BPA producers and supporters, and those who cash in on them, can say “There have been no studies in any of the 50 states on this issue! How dare you say anything bad about our poor poor innocent revenue-maker?!”
It seems that the offshore study is a trial run, a way to determine how the numbers must be jiggled in order to produce results that maximize their profits, and their ability to continue poisoning the world.
They already are. China holds nearly three times what major oil exporters hold of American debt.
But your point isn’t logical; a sound scientific study can account for many variables which may influence results. Using Chinese workers given the relatively lax worker safety and food safety laws in China cannot really yield solid conclusions when it comes to workplace exposures.
Why are Americans relying on this data, instead of data gained from their own workplace exposures? Are American companies refusing to cooperate to provide data?
Slightly OT, but while I see that BPA lining is being taken out of cans, and baby products and plastic containers announce now they are BPA free, veggies still come in plastic bags that direct you to nuke the veggies in the bag… this doesn’t seem very rational.
But here’s the flip rebuttal from corporations here: “Our workers are employed under safer working conditions!”
To which we must all respond, “Prove it.”
I have a suspicion that a substantive portion of BPA production has already moved offshore, and that American corporations refused to cooperate or prevented testing of their workers before they offshored production.
We’re still left with the problem of exposure primarily through water and foodstuffs which come in contact with BPA in packaging.
Yup. My big takeaway from this is that is a tacit admission that all the computer and high-tech manufacturing jobs that went to China in the 1990s and 2000 won’t be coming back, ever.
How many American companies still have American factories that handle BPA?
I think BPA is in Twinkies, and that just about everything else is too.
I would strongly suggest that no food or drinks in plastic be microwaved. At least put the tee vee dinners or whatever into a nonplastic container before microwaving. Better yet we might need a national campaign to boycott ALL plastic containers that touch food products. We cannot depend of the Corporate controlled federal government to protect us. The FDA is allowing 15,000 untested chemicals>into the environment. FDA GO TO HELL!.
—–”U.S. regulators promised a decade ago to screen more than 15,000 chemicals for effects on the endocrine system. So far, not one has been screened.”
“The government’s proposed tests lack new measures that would spot dangerous chemicals older screens could miss.”
“Hundreds of products have been banned in countries around the world but are available here without warning.”—–
Thanks Rayne and everyone for the excellent discussion.
Going to cost about US$1300 to buy a study to find out. Already went looking.
Agreed – I don’t microwave anything while it’s in contact with plastic of any kind.
Then again, I also worked for a chemical company for some time. Knowing what I know, I stick to glass, lead-free ceramic, stainless steel and ceramic for cooking.
While the bizarre synth-texture of Twinkies might lead one to think BPA was an intentional ingredient, it’s more likely that plastic contamination in packaged foods like Twinkies comes from the packaging itself.
Reasonable questions so I advise you email Dr.Li (Santa Rosa KP?) and ask him/her. There are lots of reasons why it may be easy, convenient, and inexpensive to collect data from, in this example, China, and grabbing it is better than not using it. It’s especially easy if the data existed already and was simply mined. Should be simple enough to find out…
There are other articles linked on the same page you link to that provide data on the dangers of BSP from research conducted in the US. There may also indeed be domestic obstacles to BSP research which this researcher and the NIH is trying to run around.
Further investigation seems to be necessary. This certainly is an important topic. If it helps us to avoid dangers, using foreign subjects seems fair to me, especially in what are essentially data mining endeavors. Thanks.
Thanks, that seemed like it was indicated, guess it’s simply assuming the consumer can’t make the connection that leads to these contradictory packaging/directions occurrences by businesses.
Actually, a lot of the BPA you’re likely to meet is in those thermal-paper receipts. (It’s part of the coating, and it goes through skin.)
(Appleton makes BPA-free paper, and they’re trying to find a way to mark it so that everyone can tell it’s BPA-free.)
Aren’t you misconstruing two points? The methodology of the study should be independent of the location. Couldn’t it be that China may have a better sample population because of the “lax worker safety…rules”? There may be something nefarious going on but it wouldn’t necessarily be just because the study is being done outside the US.
The Obama administration has proven they can’t be trusted in these matters. Bad as the BP cover up story already is more is yet to come. My guess however re this BPH thing is that they are doing it in China to avoid liability suits for US corporations. Where and who ever I do think getting post exposure data that is available is good as long as it doesn’t involve, as so often it has, further danger to the subjects.
But thank heavens, the Gov spends unlimited funds, undisturbed by calls for austerity, to ensure that we’re protected from the scourge of Marijuana!
U.S. tax dollars allocated by CDC through NIOSH should be spent to study American workers.
And yes, that’s very much part of the same issue: why weren’t these three studies done in the U.S.? Because corporations refused? Because the CDC/NIOSH are being run like FDA – corrupted by corporate influence? Because BPA production is already offshore? Why?
They are very much interrelated, and U.S. taxpayers are owed an answer.
Lovely! Our stimulus dollars at work creating jobs in China.
Foreign subjects are warranted only if there’s a greater level of transparency and solid controls in place, and the American public is okay with allocating funds in this manner. As I pointed out we don’t know what other exposures these subjects may have experienced, like the benzene spill in 2005. Nothing indicates controls to screen out other exposures.
Crikey, the air pollution in some cities like Shanghai and Beijing is so bad that it could mess with results, too. My spouse travels frequently to China and describes the pollution as so bad that he dare not open windows; his photos of cityscapes from hotel rooms reveal little beyond a city block because of the haze. Why are we paying to study subjects who may live in these kinds of conditions?
I would strongly suggest that no food or drinks in plastic be microwaved. At least put the tee vee dinners or whatever into a nonplastic container before microwaving.
What containers would you suggest instead?
One of my jobs has included testing of plastics for extractibles, and characterizing what comes out upon exposure to food simulants, and quantifying how much. The answer is usually “very little” depending upon the plastic being tested and the conditions and food being simulated. Usually the specific migrants fall under the de minimis concentration of 50 ppb.
Better yet we might need a national campaign to boycott ALL plastic containers that touch food products.
Again, to be replaced by what? For one thing, there is nothing you can use to package food that won’t “contaminate”, to some degree, the food which it contain. Even glass will yield extractibles.
And even if you did, replacing polymers with heavier container materials like glass will result in more energy costs for transportation and more food loss due to container breakage. That’s hardly what I would call a very environmentally-friendly result.
StewartM
BPA is an aromatic organic chemical. It’s probably carcinogenic as well as an endocrine disruptor.
There are no healthy aromatic (benzine ring based) compounds – benzene, toluene, phenol being some of the simpler aromatic chemicals.
My guess however re this BPH thing is that they are doing it in China to avoid liability suits for US corporations.
Eureka! Seems the most plausible answer.
IMHO transportation costs vs food contained safety is a false equivalence. Food should be local. It’s stupid to transport food thousands of miles.
That issue will get resolved very quickly as oil prices continue to rise.
I’ll happily second that.
The FDA is allowing 15,000 untested chemicals>into the environment. FDA GO TO HELL!.
I’d say that the FDA’s budgetary restrictions have more to do with that than anything else.
I also rather suspect that these have not been screened because they fell under the de minimis classification. Said classification let pass any chemical that extracted into food at concentrations < 50 ppb, provided that no previous data existed showing that said chemical or on any reasonably close analogue was a health hazard. If you were manufacturing a plastic, and the extractible testing showed that the chemicals which might leach out of this into food were 50 ppb, then you had to do toxicity studies on that chemical using animals. These toxicity studies took long enough and were expensive enough by themselves to cause a manufacturer in most instances to drop the intended use of said plastic for food applications. The FDA’s system of approval drives manufacturers to “shoot” for a de minimis target, for test results of low extractibles, period. That’s probably a good thing overall.
(And, BTW, the testing conditions to produce extractibles are rather harsh. Not unreasonably harsh, but the plastics get tested under temperatures and conditions that would mimic the top end or beyond the top end of what the intended use is, to try to *drive* any potential extractibles out of the plastic. This is done in order to err on the margin of safety).
That being said, if anyone says that we should start doing toxicity and carcinogenicity studies on 15,000 chemicals, I would agree. But keep in mind that the foods we eat are also naturally filled with toxins and carcinogens, at higher concentrations than what extracts out of plastics. That’s a proposed reason why, in fact, we age and die–that aging and death are the inevitable result of us having to *eat* all those toxins, which results in accumulating damage to the DNA in our cells. We don’t have any choice in this little life drama. Don’t eat, and you starve and die; eat, and you inevitably age and die.
StewartM
Very simply we cannot trust our former US government, which is now owned by corporations, to keep our food safe. There is always that collectivist, bolshevik solution, recycling of metal, glass and paper containers.
Why does it take two reporters, Rust and Kissinger, to discover the obvious. Plastics and Microwaves are unsafe?
IMHO transportation costs vs food contained safety is a false equivalence. Food should be local. It’s stupid to transport food thousands of miles.
Let me think about that one. With our current civilization, of some of our best farmland gets paved over, while we grow food using irrigation in deserts (and history shows the best way to turn destroy farmland is to irrigate it)–no. I am also wondering if we went to more natural farming methods, we would also have to put more land under the plow–and there is an ecological cost with agriculture as well.
But maybe a different arrangement can be proposed that would win me over. Part of the problem I see with the “everything local” is that if it leads to more land being farmed, especially if one accepts productivity loss with more basal agricultural techniques, then this furthers the pace of extinction of wildlife that we are witnessing. Agriculture has been a great factor in the loss of diversity of life in the Great Extinction we are witnessing.
StewartM
There is always that collectivist, bolshevik solution, recycling of metal, glass and paper containers.
You can also recycle plastics. And no, not just wash them and clean them, one can break them back down to the monomers and re-polymerize them, so you don’t need to drill any more oil.
(In fact, the worst thing we can be doing with oil is what we do–which is to burn most of it. Oil is the current feedstock for most of our chemicals, which includes our drugs, and it’s going to be a hard one to replace).
StewartM
That’s what I learned over 50 yr ago in petroleum engineering school and later in med school.
No mystery. These folks know what they are doing, (just as they did putting lead in gasoline 50 years or more after lead was determined to be toxic,)
BPA is an aromatic organic chemical.
It’s a monomer, not an “additive”, as the article claims. Its chief use is in polycarbonate plastics, which are formed by the esterification reaction of phosgene and BPA:
BPA monomer Phosgene monomer
Under food simulating testing, BPA is extracted into aqueous and fatty food-like simulants, in relatively high concentrations as monomers go (I have done just this kind of testing in the past, and I recall it extracts out in the ppm, rather than the ppb range). Thus it is more a legitimate concern than many extractibles. I don’t recall whether or not the mechanics of its extraction are believed to be due to residual BPA in polymer, or due to hydrolytic cleavage of BPA from the polymer chains.
There are no healthy aromatic (benzine ring based) compounds – benzene, toluene, phenol being some of the simpler aromatic chemicals.
Aromatic compounds exist in your own body. (Heterocyclic aromatics form the base for the nucleotides in your DNA). Most organic colored species are colored because they contain aromatic compounds, you need cumulative conjugation to produce color.
By that reasoning, you couldn’t eat any food that had color, no?
Also, the straight-chain alcohols are all toxic. Yet people consume ethanol, quite willingly, even though ethanol is acutely toxic, potentially addictive, and a known carcinogen.
StewartM
So, Rayne, do you think some hack temporarily assigned in China is shuffling some papers around on the desk, calling it a research study and billing the corporate-captive American taxpayer? It has happened in the past. I knew an NIHer who went into the Fed (under Clinton) and started winnowing out the BS from the real. Folks were pissed for having the gravy train stop deliveries for their faux science. I doubt that person is still in that position after the arrival of Shrubya.
I do remember see a black and white photo in a medical journal back about 1990 of a Chinese male (20s to 30s) with three tongues. I stared and estimated the point in the fetal development timeline of the birth defect due to chemical exposure. I knew China was already a toxic waste dump with a marker like that. After the fact and a bit later, the imminent extinction of the Chinese fresh water dolphins depicted in their art started to be reported (“Fabled Dolphins Face Extinction in Yangtze,” by Steven Mufson, Dec. 9, 1997, link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/china/stories/dam120997.htm).
Yes the environmentalists too often take the short cut as I did in not including dosage values. Animate life has evolved nicely balancing all kinds of “chemicals” taking the useful, necessary, mixtures and providing all kinds of mechanisms for detoxification of excesses.
When you overload these mechanisms by adding massive amounts of certain organics substances then you get subtle and not so subtle poisoning. The heavy metals, irradiation and some others’ effects are cumulative. Total dose over time. One could even say “normal” aging and death is a result of this process. Animate systems have not “learned” the perfect balancing. But as we understand it, it is stupid to overwhelm with high dosage what mechanisms are there.
Uh-huh, it’s not an additive in polycarbonate plastic.
That’s why polycarbonate plastics can’t be made without BPA, right?
Look, if it’s optional it’s an additive.
The FDA has a credibility problem — see Vioxx and Avandia as just two examples.
It’s not that they don’t have the budget; it’s that the FDA’s testing process is corrupted.
I don’t know what the motivation is; there are a number of likely reasons. The reasons for doing studies using Chinese workers should be transparent and obvious to the public which funded the studies, not opaque.
—”In fact, the worst thing we can be doing with oil is what we do–which is to burn most of it.”—
There is a worse thing that can be done, getting oil from “Frackin”. ProPublica found the newest oil extraction scheme is incredibly toxic for ground water. Then of course, the corporations will buy up all the remaining fresh water supplies with the profits from frackin.
Oh yes, the latest and greatest scheme for coverup, is the “Trade Secret” scam. It is OK to poison people if you use a trade secret poison.
I notice you left cast iron off your list of cooking pans. Is that a preference or do you have info on that material which indicates abandonment?
To my knowledge since I started following it in the early 1990s, only aluminum cooking ware has been correlated with Alzheimer’s Disease, not that of iron or steel.
Extra credit: Compare/contrast the molecular structures of chlorophyll with hemoglobin.
Nuts, I added cast iron in an edit and probably didn’t hit Submit when done. Cast iron is great and it lasts several lifetimes if well-cared for.
One of my favorite pans is a #10 cast iron frying pan which was my late mother-in-law’s. It was handed down to her from her mother-in-law. It heats quickly and evenly and if well-seasoned, non-stick.
I’m also fond of a cast iron griddle pan, too. Makes great steaks when too cold to grill outdoors, also nice panini sandwiches. I use the #10 pan as a weight on the sandwich in the grill pan.
I couldn’t live without my cast iron pan that has to be over 150 yr old as I imagine your’s is. Came in one day and the cleaning woman was trying to “shine it up” with abrasives. I came close to having a heart attack.
Don’t get me wrong … I don’t like this one bit nor the implications.
Animate systems have not “learned” the perfect balancing.
Natural selection does not function in a way to prevent bad things from happening to you after you’ve had time to reproduce. That’s why degenerative diseases and conditions such as heart disease, cancers, and Alzheimer’s are not “fixed” by natural selection.
In fact, one might say that the conservative Social Darwinists have it exactly backward. Rather than nature providing us an analogy for winner-take-all capitalist ubermenschen, a la Ayn Rand, sex acts as “wealth redistribution”–no matter how superbly fit one’s genes are it is redistributed and recombined by sexual reproduction. Aging and death similarly acts like a kind of genetic “progressive taxation” that limits the number of offspring one can have, no matter how fit–”that’s plenty enough progeny for you now, no more”.
The reason that both sex and aging and death evolved in large organisms is that no matter how supremely fit one might appear to be, slow-evolving large organisms are like H. G. Well’s Martians–forever at the risk of succumbing to bacteria and viruses. If evolution allowed a few outwardly “supremely fit” individuals to bias the gene pool with their genes disproportionately, it would provide bacteria and viruses with a genome that was a “fixed target” that could be wiped out.
StewartM
Uh-huh, it’s not an additive in polycarbonate plastic.
That’s why polycarbonate plastics can’t be made without BPA, right?
The article stated it was an “additive”. A polymer chemist would not call it so, it’s a “monomer” or an “intermediate”.
Just correcting the article.
StewartM
The FDA has a credibility problem — see Vioxx and Avandia as just two examples.
It’s not that they don’t have the budget; it’s that the FDA’s testing process is corrupted.
As I’ve said, I’ve done this kind of testing before. I understand the FDA’s reasoning. There is a legal rationale for it as well–recalling from memory of a talk I attended years back, in the 1970s the FDA ran an argument before the courts about potentially toxic chemicals extracting into food or water that even if not detected by analytical techinques, a *single molecule* could still be there undetected, and therefore would be cause for the FDA to withhold approval. The courts rejected that argument. Hence the de mimimus rule, which I’ve summarized in the above post.
As for the costs of obtaining toxcity data on 15,000 chemicals–I can’t cite any figures, but I do know that with our testing that if anything failed to fall under de minimus classification, the project was killed internally due to time and cost of getting the toxicity data.
I wonder if any of these chemicals are now currently listed under the FDA’s “GRAS” listing? (Generally Regarded As Safe).
StewartM
It’s certainly why the chemical industry has moved some of the most hazardous chemical manufacturing processes overseas. The nastier the chemical, the more likely it’s made “over there”.
StewartM
I went back to cast iron several years ago and haven’t looked back. The griddle is also a favorite. I made a birthday breakfast today using it, and my partner was delighted!
But my real favorite is the dutch oven. Someday, I’m going to get one with the cover which holds hot coals and do some biscuits out doors.
A number of years ago, I was cooking a meal which included a picatta. Since we had many guests, I divided the ingredients in half, cooked on half in a big cast iron pan, the other in an enameled cast iron pan. Same size. The difference in taste was stunning, with the plain cast iron winning out. The process was simultaneous so the only difference was the pans. What to do? Who gets the better batch? While I was puzzling it out, my cooking partner solved it for me. She mixed it all together (Sniff!).
Today my stainless/aluminum 10″ pan is exclusively for omlettes.
And nobody cleans my cast iron but me. Nobody!! My SO is well trained in that regard and is happy to comply!
The Canadian government has officially determined that Bis Phenol A, is toxic.
Possibly true ’nuff. Some of this is simply a case of “science marches on”.
One of my professors shared his experience working at an old water electrolysis plant that produced sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid. Used in that process was mercury to carry the metallic sodium until it was reacted with water to form the hydroxide. In the process he said they used to lose truckloads of mercury metal in their material balances–but it wasn’t a deemed a concern, it was felt that if mercury got out into the environment, if it got into the nearby river, it would just sink to the bottom and stay there, inert. Nothing much would happen. Mercury is pretty chemically inert, right??
Only later, however, did we learn that yes, while mercury is relatively chemically inert, it *can* be digested by microorganisms to form methyl mercury–which is quite toxic and which builds up in the fatty tissues of organisms up the food chain. The bottom of rivers provided just the right environment for the anaerobic conversion of mercury metal to methyl mercury. What was once not considered a big deal became a case of “Oh shit!!”
Truth be told, there is a hubris associated with our technology, and despite one thinking that one is on firm ground on something and that something is safe, sometimes that turns out not so.
(I should tell you about some of the howlers from medical science picking up a 1950-era medical home encyclopedia. Let’s see–a picture of a man running was shown with a caption “This man may be unknowingly risking a heart attack”, the dangers of cigarette smoking were “probably overstated”, while alcoholism was put down to “weak personalities who suffered psychological problems” who needed psychotherapy to “return them to a life of normal drinking, including the traditional celebratory uses” (i.e, getting pasted on New Year’s Eve).
None of these medical “truths” from 1950 is believed today. Exercise now is seen as preventing heart disease, the risks of smoking are now found to have been understated, not overstated, and the causes of alcoholism, while complex, are believed largely to be the result of genetics rather than “weak personalities”–and whatever the cause, eliminating drinking is seen as the safest treatment, not “normal drinking” which includes getting drunk on New Year’s).
StewartM
Are “American” workers physiologically different from Chinese workers? Is this research only valid if it is conducted here? Or is it possible that the results could still be used to benefit Americans?
One reason I ask is for example; the engines on the Atlas (V) rocket were designed (and originally manufactured in) Russia. By your logic we should not have used them because American tax dollars were spent to support Korolyov’s work. Do we have to bring all those satellites back down and find a valid American launch platform?
I won’t dispute your implication that the CDC/FDA may be the subjects of corporate capture. In many cases they appear to be. But if that is the case and corporations refused to participate, wouldn’t this research have just quietly died? And if BPA production has been completely off-shored, then we have no sample of American workers to study.
I agree that questions should be asked and this issue followed up but sometimes the answers really are fairly simple and there is not always a grand conspiracy to screw the public. Even if it usually seems that way.
Had Enough — as the nesting ends after four replies, I’m responding to your question/comment here.
No, Chinese do not have a different physiology. Read my post and my comments here carefully. The point is that Chinese workers are exposed to many more environmental toxins due to much more lax worker safety and food safety laws than here in the U.S., not to mention the abysmal environmental laws in China. How can any scientist studying Chinese workers rule out that impacts they find are solely based on BPA exposure? They may have control group subjects, but we have no idea what differentiates these control group persons from the chemical plant employees, can only assume on the face of it that the studies were BPA Workers/Non-BPA workers.
And we don’t know if BPA is offshored – there’s no explanation offered about the use of Chinese workers. Even if BPA has been offshored (and I expect much of it has), there are still test groups here in the U.S. of workers who did work in BPA plants (I am absolutely certain of this), which could be checked for results of exposures which began in the late 1980s and ran for over a decade.
The use of the Atlas rocket is a rather inept example, by the way; it’s a one-off and not a product which is used by millions of individuals including children.
I still don’t think you can rule out a corrupted approval process.
Take a good look at the use of Correxit in the Gulf of Mexico.
And the average non-chemist reading about BPA would understand the terms “monomer” or an “intermediate”?
That’s crap.
“Would anybody care to explain why U.S. tax dollars are testing BPA exposures in China and not here on U.S. workers?”
Maybe the Chinese government demanded that we figure out what our factories are doing to their workers.
Unlike the US public, the Chinese Government does have some cards to play in Washington DC. We depend on China for a lot of free imports.
Don’t you think that might be something the public needs to know if that’s the case?
bah, just glad the study is done. about time the five year study was concluded.
There’s no mystery here.
US workers can sue the responsible party (i.e. their employers etc.) if they are found to have health problems connected to BPA exposure, that’s why the study is being done in China. Chinese workers don’t have the same legal protections.
And the average non-chemist reading about BPA would understand the terms “monomer” or an “intermediate”?
That’s crap.
A polymer “additive” is not, generally speaking, incorporated into the polymer itself, but physically mixed with it. For this reason, their use might span a wide variety of types of polymers. UV blocking agents, antioxidants, dyes, plasticizers, etc., are examples of additives. (Caveat–their are some dyes which are polymerizable, but they are relatively rare).
A monomer is integrated into the polymer itself. It’s part of the polymer, and what we’re talking about with BPA extractibles are leftover “bricks” which were used to construct the polymer “building” that might extract into food or water when used for packaging.
The reason why this distinction is important is more than just nerdy semantics. To certify that a polymer is “BPA free” nowadays requires *testing*–even though said polymer was not polymerized using BPA, so none could possibly be there. Yet manufacturers are required to test for it, at very low concentrations, so the testing protocols are not trivial. They spend time and money testing for a monomer which is not present and will never be present.
Now–if you want manufacturers to test for potential extractibles from their products into food or water from packaging, and to do it more thoroughly, I’m all for it. However, since resources are always limited, it’s better to test for thing which can be present, or to characterize more fully the things which *are present*, rather than to go on wild goose chases for a monomer which cannot be present, just because it has gotten negative publicity.
No?
StewartM
I still don’t think you can rule out a corrupted approval process.
Sure. My experience is that the corruption of the process does not occur at the level of the FDA, however, but at industry–and not with particular industries, but at the industry consortium level.
Let me give an example of this. My dealings with consortium-type lawyers, is that what they want is for the scientists to “dumb down” the testing methodology as much as possible. They want to “dumb down” the testing because 1) they have an perspective of “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” and that tests that inform as little as possible are thus preferred; and 2) their clientèle includes members who are technically challenged to perform more rigorous and demanding testing. Ergo, the lawyers want to make the tests as simple and low-tech as possible so that even their most challenged members can do them.
At my job, we fought this attitude. We knew we could do the job better, and we figured that it was actually to our company’s advantage that we push the FDA to set the testing bar higher–after all, that would not be a problem for us, but it would be a problem for others, and it would give us a competitive advantage. The consortium lawyers obviously don’t look at it that way.
Once, I visited DC and visited Congress. I was shown the door of my district’s Congressman, who was sitting in his office looking rather senile and befuddled. He was a conservative Republican, getting up in age, who had been a congressman-for-life for decades, who didn’t do that much when he wasn’t chasing local skirts or getting free dinners at local restaurants surrounded by his cronies staff. He also declared America’s health care system “the best in the world”–and for him, it was, as all the local hospitals reserved rooms for him to use free of charge. But I digress.
Anyway, when he found out my job, and that I did work for FDA compliance, he immediately went onto a rant about “government regulation” that he thought would win a sympathetic ear. But no! I told him that I thought the FDA did a good job, that its standards should be higher, because for the very reason I cited above–setting the bar standard is a good thing for industries with the know-how. I also told him that the one problem we did have with the FDA was the time delays for obtaining approval, but this could be remedied by giving the FDA a bigger budget and by making sure that if it were setting the rules for everyone, that its pay scale for its technical staff should be raised as to attract the best and most talented scientists so that they could make the best decisions.
That was NOT the answer he was expecting. I was shortly escorted out of his office. ;-)
StewartM