The BPA Scare--Masterfully Debunked

If you've ever wondered what is behind the movement to effectively ban bisphenol A (BPA)—a widely used chemical—that has become a hot topic among Greens and their useful idiot political and media poodles, a comprehensive answer awaits you... The masterful report entitled "Science Suppressed:  How America became obsessed with BPA," released by STATS.

STATS is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization affiliated with the George Mason University. Its mission is to improve the quality of scientific and statistical information in public discourse and to act as a resource for journalists and policy makers on scientific issues and controversies.

Notably, neither STATS.org nor the author received any payment from any industry or other source associated with the manufacture, use, or distribution of bisphenol A.

Here are a few highlights...

A handful of scientists and environmental activist groups claim that bisphenol A is the biological equivalent of global warming, and its presence in plastic bottles and can linings is endangering "millions of babies." Their message—and their accusation that the Food and Drug Administration has been swayed by industry-sponsored studies and has ignored vital scientific evidence—has led Congress to ask the agency to re-examine the safety of the chemical. A decision is expected by the end of the summer.

Missing in this debate is that it's not just "industry groups" that think BPA shouldn't be banned—or just industry-sponsored studies that say it's safe. Scientists, regulators, and politicians in Europe, Australia, and Japan have all rejected the evidence that the chemical is harmful as methodologically flawed, badly conducted or irrelevant—with some warning that banning it could actually endanger the public. Now that the National Institutes of Health has acknowledged it funded a lot of poorly-designed research on BPA—the very research that activists touted as evidence that the chemical is deadly—it's time to ask whether America has been spun by clever marketing rather than clever science.

 

Author Trevor Butterworth uses surgical precision in his takedown of BPA fear entrepreneur Fred vom Saal, and his media sycophants at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel...

The cumulative effect of all this research and statistical analysis is that vom Saal, though highly vocal about the risks of BPA and the media’s go-to source for explaining the science, has found his research and his claims repeatedly rejected in regulatory assessments of the chemical’s risk in the past decade. When the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel claims he is considered a "leading authority" on the chemical, it is by virtue of the consideration of journalists and not his fellow toxicologists. His contention that BPA is highly toxic to humans has not been accepted by any major risk assessment conducted in the last decade. Indeed, EFSA [European equivalent of our FDA] went in the opposite direction, raising the reference dose for BPA by a factor of five, meaning that it considered the allowable daily intake for the chemical over the course of a lifetime to be significantly safer than had once been thought.

They [the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel] jumped straight to the conclusion that vom Saal must be right and everything else must be wrong. There was no puzzling out how such a flagrant dichotomy could come to be, there was no exploring of our [NTP’s Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR) BPA panel] position, no digging around to try to understand what was happening. And important research WAS ignored.

I [Dr. Bill Durodié], felt vom Saal's presentation in London had every hall-mark of old-fashioned quackery. That is just my opinion after all. My reading of the literature indicated he was viewed by others in the field with a degree of circumspection to say the least. Gail Charnley, the then President of the Society for Risk Analysis, whilst not describing him specifically, suggested in an editorial that the whole field of endocrine disruption was a conclusion in search of data. Finally, the very fact that the detractors have to, again and again, refer to the work of a single investigator, or a limited number of his past collaborators, the results of whom others are unable to replicate, should alert them to a problem. In science at least, data does have to be independently verified.

 

Among other things, the anti-BPA crowd conflated oral ingestion with intravenous and subcutaneous injection, skewing results. But the Journal Sentinel tries to skate around this...

Animals tested were fed BPA through pumps under the skin that regularly administered the chemical. Some critics say that method exaggerates the chemical's effects. But others say it is an acceptable method because newborns are constantly feeding.

Butterworth asks...

How would readers understand this passage if they knew that "some critics" included the World Health Organization, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the European Food Safety Authority? What editor would allow such a characterization to make it to print if they were truly aware of the degree of opposition within toxicology and pharmacology to assessing the risks of oral ingestion through subcutaneous injection?

 

Anyone familiar with the PC nature of awards in journalism would not be surprised that the Journal Sentinel was lauded for its biased hack work on BPA, but it took STATS to bring this to light.

I suggest you download the entire report.

Absolutely a bravura job by Trevor Butterworth and STATS.

Comments

[selfpastdestruction]

I'm glad i stumbled upon this site, otherwise I might not have had a chance to see that STATS report.
Makes me want to blog about this. Information about subjects like this should be available to more people.

Now, I live in California -- yes, the land of the fruits and nuts ;-]
And there's no shortage of eco-poser nonsense around here. In fact, its all the rage to carry around those water bottles that do not contain BPA. Apparently it makes you more 'pure'.

This really is a new religion.
And I'm the heretic for having 'a problem with it'?!

I'm not sure where I fit in, not even with the crazies here?!
I suppose I should count that as a blessing ha ha.

I am a 24 year old male of mixed descent (mexican, irish, german, native american, ukraine) , employed by myself, a devout atheist (ex-christian in fact ;-]) who would love to see the disbanding of organized religion. I love abortions, I think guns are dandy and highly useful, I think we should legalize and regulate all drugs, I have no problem with gay marriage, I think solar and wind power are lousy (inefficient garbage...), and smoke cannabis for therapy daily. I don't align myself with any political ideology (because it's really NOT that simple) so therefor I have no backup support, just my own critical thinking and a will to find what's there, not to just find what i want to find. People accuse me of spreading religious propaganda by questioning things like anthropomorphic climate change. That's not science. But they don't want science.. they want... well, I don't know what they want. But it sounds retarded, and like a big waste of time. Like the time I spent in the voting booth voting for Obama just because I didn't want McCain's vapid anti-drug policies enforced. Then it turns out that Obama can't do anything to stop federal raids on legitimate medical marijuana patients, so I might as well have not even voted for him. Just another guy. He just happens to be black. that excites some people. Me? Well, I actually care more about what the person does than what they look like but hey that's just me.

Apparently to some people, some or all of those things I listed above makes me radical. Because I can't easily be aligned with a political ideology. I'm dangerous, and subversive... [to certain special-interest groups yea....]

That means you are too.
Go you =]

We need more people exposing this defecation of science posing as a health-risk.

[Michael Shaw]

Self--

Thanks for your comments. As you have discovered, the real "religious zealots" are the Greenie lunatics. BPA, sadly, is not the only example of belief-driven science.

You are also right to distrust the vast majority of politicians. I thought I was cynical when I lived in California, but it took moving to the DC metro to bring my cynicism to its current state!