It's Time To End The Anti-BPA Hysteria

This time, I can't improve on the title of my latest HND article.

When you hear from regulatory agencies all around the world that BPA is safe, you have to wonder what keeps the hysteria going. Here are four big factors:

• Chemophobic nutters within the EPA and NIH, who use the granting process to keep junk science alive
• Feckless journos whose worldview has not changed since they were in the sixth grade: Corporations are evil, big government is good, and it is just not possible that someone like Freddie vom Saal could also have an agenda
• Disgraceful editorial standards at many technical journals
• Fear-based fund-raising efforts by so-called Green organizations

You might like the takedown of Consumer Reports, an otherwise reliable publication, that has somehow let the incredibly biased Dr. Urvashi Rangan hijack their good name as their "technical policy director." Rangan's story is that right out of school, as a young Ph.D., she was hired by an evil pharm company, that fired her when she raised safety issues about a drug.

Excuse me if I don't believe this tale. She became a fringe chemophobe because a big bad pharm company fired her? Maybe she quit, or maybe there were other reasons. Given the FDA process, researchers are supposed to try to find issues with drugs, right?

Or maybe, riffing on my pal Bob Golden, she got religion after being in the pharmaceutical business: If the linear no-threshold model were actually true, then there would be no pharmacology, so in that sense, I suppose she had to leave the industry!

To top things off, she is likely the impetus behind Consumer Reports' absurd support of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.

Read the complete article.