Hands Off My Plastic Stuff

Out of the UK today comes some unfortunately misguided information from Breast Cancer UK and we want to make sure that people seeking information about BPA find accurate information.

While we wholeheartedly wish for a world in which support groups for cancer patients and their families don’t have to exist, we also wish wholeheartedly for a world in which science is left to the scientists. From Food Production Daily:

“In a report published today the charity said the government and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) continue to cite a ‘few, very limited’ scientific studies to support their opinion that BPA is safe to use in packaging.

“It claims to highlight how much evidence there is that the chemical affects the structure and development of the mammary gland, increase breast density, and disrupts DNA – all factors known to increase the risk of developing breast cancer.”

The problem here? The studies the charity is referring to are junk science studies. We go back to our central premise: if you inject a lab mouse with 1,000-times the amount of BPA a person normally encounters during the day, of course the mouse is going to develop some pretty extreme health problems. But you cannot base sound scientific assessments on studies that do not replicate normal exposure.

You could inject a mouse with 1,000-times the normal human daily exposure of Vitamin B and the mouse is going to wind up with some pretty serious health problems.

The overwhelming concern of these junk science studies is that they scare vulnerable people – even otherwise rational people – into believing things that simply aren’t true. Like this report from the breast cancer charity that normal, daily exposure to BPA leads to breast cancer. That has never been proven by credible science, and the regulatory agencies tasked with the responsibility for overseeing chemicals like BPA have all said so: The Food & Drug Administration here in the U.S., the UK Food Standards Agency and the EFSA. In fact, not only are these agencies stating there is no harm from BPA, they’re going so far as to declare its safety.

From Food Production Daily:

“While the FSA considers the current level of consumer exposure to BPA from food contact materials does not represent a food safety risk for consumers, it continues to keep the scientific evidence on BPA under review and will act to protect consumers if the evidence shows that it is necessary to do so,” said an FSA statement sent to FoodProductionDaily.com.”

Last month, we discussed the comments from Sir John Beddington, formerly the British government’s top scientist who stepped down from his post and was feeling freer to speak candidly about certain topics. According to Trevor Butterworth’s article at Forbes.com, Sir Beddington had to say about BPA in baby bottles:

“I think the only way you can hurt babies with Bisphenol A bottles is to batter them with them.”

That’s a pretty definitive statement from the guy whose job it was to understand how exposure to chemicals affected people and to provide the British government on his recommendations regarding dangerous and hazards. What Sir Beddington also understands – and what generally eludes zealots and do-gooders who naively buy into junk-science studies – is the difference between “risk” and “hazard.” More from Butterworth:

“A hazard is something that can cause harm; a risk is the probability that a hazard will cause harm.

“He used the example of coffee to illustrate the point. At extremely high doses, coffee can trigger cancer. But ‘if you just say this is a hazard, it is a carcinogen, or it is an endocrine disrupter, or whatever, and you just classify and regulate chemicals on that basis, and ignore the level of exposure,’ he said, ‘you’re hamming it.’

“The key, he said, was to think about regulation as a ‘quantitative’ exercise and not simply a matter of identifying whether something was present or absent. ‘There’s a real danger that what’s happening in the European community, in particular, is the over-use of the precautionary principle and a failure to understand the difference between risk and hazard.’”

Here in the U.S., and we wrote about this before, too, a researcher from the Silent Sprint Institute – certainly no friend of chemicals – complimented a trio of FDA researchers on the work they’ve done on BPA and understanding how normal exposure affects humans. Butterworth again got the goods on this when he sat in on a panel at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Conference in February:

“So it came as something of a shock to the panel and the audience when, after the presentation by the FDA’s Daniel Doerge, Ruthann Rudel, an expert on endocrine disruption at the Silent Spring Institute (named after the Rachel Carson book which ignited the environmental movement) praised his research.

“’I actually just want to thank you for the work that you’ve done, because I’ve found your studies to be some of the most clarifying and helpful pieces of information in making my way through the bisphenol A woods,’ said Rudel.”

Those kinds of compliments are rare so it’s especially worth noting them.

While we respect Breast Cancer UK’s valiant goal of eliminating breast cancer (and we will be among those cheering the loudest when a cure is announced), we can’t abide their buying into junk-science studies that unnecessarily frighten women fighting and suffering from this disease, families supporting women in the fight, and, most unfortunate, families who’ve lost loved ones to it. Science belongs with scientists.

The latest fear-mongering news coverage of BPA involves yet another unfounded “link” between the plastics chemical and the lung function of kids.

While the headline in this story makes the typically screaming assertion of a “link” to breathing problems and references a study of asthma in mice, it makes no mention of a study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology that showed prenatal exposure to BPA actually reduced wheezing in children at age 5.

Another aspect of this most recent study is that the researchers were limited in the data available to them, and were hampered by the short half-life of BPA. These inconvenient facts are relegated to the final paragraph of the Med Page Today story.  After all, nobody except maybe The Onion would ever run a story with the headline “BPA Research Shows Everything is Just Fine.” But a more important point in this discussion is the nexus between research grant money and how BPA and other chemical research is designed, conducted and presented to the public.

Most studies are done by university and college researchers and the money to conduct their research often comes in the form of taxpayer dollars. University researchers and their media support staff are incentivized to arrive at and promote data that suggest some sort of harm caused by the product being studied. If there is nothing to demonstrate harm – like this most recent study which Med Page Today noted at the end of its report that “researchers could not suggest causality,” between BPA and lung function – they invariably turn to the ubiquitous “link.” Virtually anything can be “linked” to virtually anything else and the people who promote such nonsense know that they can obtain screaming headline news coverage if they can “link” something to anything.

The net result is that research which is not conclusive, poorly designed and based on incomplete data is nonetheless promoted widely in the press, leading to notoriety and prestige for the researcher and providing the bedrock for the next grant money request. More grant money helps a university researcher achieve tenure, further increasing their prestige not to mention adding to their wealth. With job security and prestige on the line, it’s small wonder we’re not hearing about how BPA actually reduces wheezing in kids at age 5 when they’re exposed to it in the womb.

As for the media’s role in all of this, it’s the same general theory that accounts for the near zero coverage of the most recent pronouncement by the Food and Drug Administration that BPA is “safe,” in food contact applications. We draw your attention to the fact that FDA declares BPA safe because this is fairly unusual for a regulatory agency. More often, we hear that a certain substance is “generally regarded as safe,” or that there is no evidence of harm.  But in the case of BPA, FDA issued an explicit determination of safety for food contact uses.

Of course this type of story will be ignored by the press because it’s easier for them to sell newspapers or draw viewers with a headline or promo warning moms that plastic is going to turn their kids into freakish mutants.

The question that nobody can answer yet is the degree to which greed fuels the current discussion of BPA. Between researchers seeking job security, financial gain and additional multi-million dollar grants funded by taxpayers, and news organizations desperate for readers and viewers, it’s a good bet that money plays a big part in what consumers are told about BPA. It’s shameful that what ought to be the inquisitive and objective pursuit of knowledge through science is bastardized by greed and ego.

It’s like they’re not even trying. At the least, when you’re going to write an attack on something, take five minutes to do a basic Google search. But we suppose that’s too much effort for the tin-foil hat crowd.

According to Natural News Tracker (motto: Destroy the Myths! Reveal the Truth for Health Enthusiasts!), BPA is a “silent killer.” Despite absolutely no evidence to back up anything even remotely like that statement, and mountains of proof to the contrary, they’re off and running:

“Bisphenol-A, or BPA in short, has been a hot topic of discussion for quite some time now. It is widely used nowadays in dental fillings, adhesives, food and drink cans and thousands of other materials that come into direct human contact in everyday life. However, the truth remains that BPA is extremely harmful to human health. Most of the independently funded researches have concluded that BPA almost invariably results in causing diseases, cancer and infertility in human body. “

Actually, health enthusiasts, there is no credible research that makes any such conclusion. And by “credible,” we mean, research that involves relevant test subjects, realistic dosing and real-world modes of entry and exposure, like that being done on behalf of the US Food & Drug Administration that shows the everyday exposure to BPA has not been proven to have any harmful effect on human health – at all.

FDA has even gone so far as to declare BPA “safe” in normal consumer use for food contact.  In fact, what the credible research is showing is how off-base the junk science research is. If a guy from the Silent Spring Institute compliments the FDA’s research, they’ve got to be doing something right, right?

But the nuttery doesn’t end there. And this is where a simple Google search might have spared NNT from more self-inflicted buffoonery:

“The horror does not stop here; instead it has extended to the level of harming even babies and infants. Things that are used to feed a baby, like baby bottles and sippy cups, are lined with BPA. Moreover, the lids of baby food jars and the cans that hold ready-to-feed substances are also found to have significant amount of BPA.”

Wow. Horror. And here we thought the Saw movies were horror but apparently we were wrong; it’s BPA. And by the way, baby bottles and sippy cups are not lined with BPA; they’re made of shatterproof plastic. And no, canned food does not contain a significant amount of BPA either. The BPA that is used to make can liners (for “ready-to-feed substances,” otherwise known as “food”) which protect us from salmonella, botulism and other food-borne disease results in miniscule human exposure and the body metabolizes and eliminates the stuff in a day or less.

The real harm is from inaccurate posts like the one from Natural News Tracker and similar scare-mongering sites that frighten consumers about products that are perfectly safe. We wrote a while back on Carrie Lukas’ excellent report for the Independent Women’s Forum about the financial support given to finding a cure for breast cancer vs. the financial support for issues like BPA:

“Yet the fear-mongering around certain substances also leads to a misallocation of resources that could be identifying the real drivers of cancer or new treatments and cures. Between 2009 and 2012, National Institute of Health grant funding increased about 2.6 percent. NIH’s breast cancer research fared much better, increasing by 13 percent. Yet BPA-related research did the best of all, rising more than 135% during that time frame.

“In fact, thousands of studies have been conducted on BPA’s impact, and none have ever shown harm from normal use. How many more studies do taxpayers have to pay for, for activists to be satisfied that normal use of BPA is safe? Given that the paucity of evidence that BPA really presents a risk, wouldn’t these extra research dollars be better targeted elsewhere, such as to additional research on new treatments for diseases like breast cancer?

The NNT does manage to end its fairytale with a remarkable flourish: calling out the FDA for apparently being idiots for not conforming to what everyone knows to be true. This “rogue” agency simply “cannot be trusted!”

Yes, of course, the government! They’re part of the conspiracy to kill us! Like the fake moon landing. And space aliens. And what about Area 51? And we think BPA may have been on the Grassy Knoll in Dallas too.

We’re sorry to say that a lot of good tin foil is being wasted these days making hats for the good folks at  NNT headquarters.

Ranking

On our scale of one to five ribbons, with five ribbons reserved for the worst offenders, this week’s article is so wacky that we feel like we’re insulting other winners by giving it five ribbons. But Natural News Tracker really is something special. It’s one of the weirdest collections of BPA untruths that we’ve seen in a long time. What really put them into the winner’s circle is their suspicion about the FDA being complicit in foisting horrors on American consumers.

Articles like this that pose as credible news do a true disservice to people who are interested in credible, proven, truthful information.

Sheer, unadulterated desperation among the anti-chemical crowd was on display in the pages of the Wall Street Journal April 22; a source has sought to link death to plastic. 

That’s right, death. 

Consumers have been scared for so long about so many things involving plastics, particularly bisphenol A, yet oddly enough not a single government regulatory agency on this or any other planet has decided to ban or restrict BPA because of adverse effects on human health.  So what’s next?  We suppose it’s inevitable that these people, in utter and foolish desperation, would turn to death.  We quote:

“We don’t know if and how many people die from plastic exposure,” says Dr. (Rolf) Halden”

Notice it’s not “We don’t if or how many,” it’s “We don’t know if and how many.”  Nice.  How very scientific of the good doctor.

But he missed one thing - a huge thing, actually.  We do know how many deaths and illnesses have been caused by BPA.  The answer is none.  Ever.  Anywhere.  Nowhere has anybody at any time suffered any illness or any death from BPA.

But hey, here we’ve got a guy who’s willing to link plastics to death so it shows how desperate this crowd has become in just the past few months.  Either that or somebody at some university is fishing for a taxpayer-funded grant to study death by plastic.

After the death invocation in the second paragraph of this article, the author gets to a real whopper.  We quote:

“The FDA banned the use of BPA in baby bottles in July 2012, because of growing consumer concerns over its link to developmental delays.”

Okay, we know what you’re thinking.  This is supposed to be a grown-up newspaper run by grown-up people so how can they print something as wrong as this?  After all, the literate among us know well that the Food and Drug Administration did not ban BPA from baby bottles because it cased harm.  The FDA accepted a request by the US plastic industry to end to the use of BPA in that application because nobody was doing it anymore and had not been doing it for several years.

It’s just another effort by the desperate anti-chemical types who see that they are faced with a losing proposition on BPA.  The stuff is safe and regulators have stated – emphatically! – that BPA is “safe.”  Now, it looks like they’re recruiting new writers to try and push the old BPA-OMG! narrative and in the process, are finding it easy to pass along bad and factually incorrect information to writers who have not bothered to learn the facts or just don’t give a rip.

But then again, that’s the whole point of the anti-chemical crowd, isn’t it?

The Independent Women’s Forum is out with an excellent Policy Focus report on “Chemicals and Cancer.” Should be concerned about cancer-causing chemicals? Yes. Should that concern be kept in-check so as not to create alarmism, needlessly scare consumers and ratchet up the costs of everyday items that are perfectly fine for us humans to be around? Absolutely.

And that’s what IWF Senior Fellow Angela Logomasini, Ph.D, says.

“If everyday exposure to common chemicals were a significant cause of cancer, we would expect rates to go up as we used more and more chemicals. However, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) reports that since 1975 cancer incidence has continued to decline among men and declined for women until 2006, after which rates stabilized.

“Research suggests that most cancers are caused by tobacco use, diet, infections, and genetics. Although, long-term, relatively high level exposures to certain chemicals may pose cancer risks, there is little evidence demonstrated that the relatively low-level chemical exposures from consumer products pose significant risks.

“Alarmism, however, about the relationship between cancer and chemicals can result in real harm: It distracts the public and researches from focusing on the most significant cancer risks and encourages regulators to adopt rules that make our products more costly and in some cases less safe, while yielding little meaningful health benefits.”

While the Internet can be an excellent source of information, it can also be an equally excellent source of misinformation. But how can consumers tell the difference, especially when people have been predispositioned to believe that anything “industry” says is a lie while comments from seemingly well-intentioned strangers are believed and passed along as “fact”?

We’re barraged with countless links and posts about how someone’s sister’s husband’s cousin’s neighbor’s daughter’s teacher was stricken with cancer after she used product X. Warnings about product X start popping up everywhere; scientific studies and research suddenly appear that claim to prove a link between product X and horrible diseases. Consumers are urged to sign petitions, sign up for informational newsletters and forward the information to friends and family. Most often, these types of campaigns are aimed at women with young families on the theory that a young mother will do anything to protect her children. The implication, of course, being that if Young Mother doesn’t shun product X, then she’s putting her children at risk – and what caring mother would ever want to do anything that could harm her child?

As Dr. Logomasini states in her report, “Hype about chemicals fosters misguided priorities and an unhealthy culture of fear about common, safe products.” The emphasis added on “safe” is from us because, of the vast majority of chemicals we encounter day-to-day, we have such low exposure that the effects are negligible. So how then do scientists and researches claim the links between chemicals like BPA and cancer in lab animals? It’s simple: they expose the animals to inordinately high levels of chemicals delivered in ways that humans do not encounter them and then state that the experiment proves the point. But as we’ve debunked time and again, one cannot draw reasonable conclusions between a human’s very limited exposure to BPA in a plastic container and injecting the undiluted chemical directly into the bloodstream of a lab rat.

When compared to the hyperventilating, junk science flooding the internet, credible research just seems so boring. When was the last time you saw a headline in your local newspaper declaring, Chemical H Declared Safe, instead of the more exciting, Chemical H Link to Cancer Exposed? Internet rumorologists have discovered what newspaper editors have long known: It if bleeds, it leads. And we’re all paying the cost for this, according to the IWF report:

“Fear of cancer is also used as a pretext to advance regulations that limit the use of chemicals in common products and processes. These unnecessary regulations come with serious costs, as they make products needlessly expensive, less effective, and even less safe. For example, misplaced fears about pesticides mean that fewer products are available to control insect-borne diseases. Proposed bans on the chemical bisphenol A, which makes resins to line food containers, could lead to the development of dangerous pathogens in our food supply.

“Americans are too often bombarded with warnings about threats to their family’s health. This creates needless stress and worry, and makes it difficult to prioritize which warnings one should take seriously. Americans deserve the [truth] about the causes of cancer rather than counter-productive alarmism.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Take the time to read the report. It will be time well spent.

Trevor Butterworth again proves why he’s one of our favorite writers in a piece about the wisdom of Sir John Beddington, formerly the British government’s top scientist, who had some choice words about risk versus hazard.

Beddington, who recently stepped down from his post, held forth in a discussion at the United Kingdom’s Media Centre on the very important differences between the two. In a nutshell, writes Butterworth on Forbes.com:

“A hazard is something that can cause harm; a risk is the probability that a hazard willcause harm.

“He used the example of coffee to illustrate the point. At extremely high doses, coffee can trigger cancer. But ‘if you just say this is a hazard, it is a carcinogen, or it is an endocrine disrupter, or whatever, and you just classify and regulate chemicals on that basis, and ignore the level of exposure,’ he said, ‘you’re hamming it.’

“The key, he said, was to think about regulation as a ‘quantitative’ exercise and not simply a matter of identifying whether something was present or absent. ‘There’s a real danger that what’s happening in the European community, in particular, is the over-use of the precautionary principle and a failure to understand the difference between risk and hazard.’”

So we’ve established there exists a very real and significant difference between how a thing should be categorized and regulated. So what did Sir Beddington have to say about BPA? Only one of the best things we’ve seen in a long time:

“I think the only way you can hurt babies with Bisphenol A bottles is to batter them with them.”

Remember that Europe has banned BPA in sippy cups on “precautionary grounds.” We supported the industry’s push through the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to formalize the agency’s prohibition against the chemical in sippy cups because we believed the industry was coming at it from the right perspective: this is something we’re doing voluntarily, let’s just get the official stamp of approval.

Here in the U.S., as Butterworth points out, the media narrative focuses on the alarmist studies that frequently indicate results that cannot be replicated elsewhere or use such a high level of exposure to BPA as to be ridiculous. As we’ve said many, many times over, even water will kill you if get too much of it into your system. But the UK “has avoided much of the hysteria,” and here’s why:

“The United Kingdom has avoided much of the hysteria over BPA in part due to stronger mechanisms for government-funded scientists to speak to the press about what they see as weak or erroneous research. In contrast to the media narrative in the US, which has overwhelmingly reported the alarmist concerns of a small group of scientists and largely ignored regulatory research that rebuts this alarmism, the situation in the UK is the opposite: the bigger and more experimentally rigorous the study, the more emphasis has been placed on the reliability of its findings – and these have overwhelmingly been studies funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the FDA, and Europe’s Food Safety Authority (EFSA).“

Now, we want to encourage you to read the full piece for yourself – it’s a fast read. But we want to point out, for those of who might not click on the link, that Sir Beddington is generally aligned with environmentalism. He’s also aligned on the side of common sense and smarts. He’s not an activist by any means, having earned degrees from the London School of Economics and University of Edinburgh. He was named Chief Scientific Adviser effectively January 1, 2008 and served until April 1, 2013. From Butterworth:

“As an expert on population biology, he has forcefully argued the case for urgent intervention on climate warming, winning backing from Friends of the Earth (although the group was less enthusiastic about his insistence that the United Kingdom could not abandon nuclear power); and in drawing attention to the challenges of population growth and energy and food shortages, Britain’s Guardian declared in an editorial that ‘he did the right and brave thing.’”

The French food safety agency ANSES is hard at work scaring pregnant women by claiming all nature of harm from bisphenol A (BPA). Based on this report from AFP, it appears that ANSES has finally jumped the shark:

“The agency said bisphenol A could be dangerous if ingested, inhaled or simply by touching products that contain it — including thermal paper like that used to make cash register slips.”

That’s right folks, French women – and people around the world who are seeing this wire report – are being targeted by some of the most blatant fear mongering we have yet seen from a regulatory agency. If BPA is dangerous, “simply by touching products that contain it,” it won’t be long until some other activist claims harm from looking at BPA. Perhaps thinking about BPA is risky too.

But let’s put this in perspective. For starters, ANSES is pretty much on the fringe in sounding this silly alarm. The European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) has issued no such warning.  In fact, the agency has repeatedly stated that there is no evidence or expectation of harm from BPA in normal consumer use. However, the EFSA recently announced it is receiving public comments on BPA regulation with a final recommendation scheduled for November.

Curiously, this hysterical announcement from ANSES comes about 10 days after the EFSA announced the public comment period on BPA regulation and safe daily doses. Anybody think ANSES may be trying to influence the process without any science to back up their claims?

Here’s another twisted aspect to this wholly politicized process. While ANSES is issuing baseless warnings with no science to support them, and attracting plenty of media coverage in the process, the most recent position on BPA from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) received nary a peep from the media, American or otherwise.

What did FDA have to say about BPA?  It was actually pretty remarkable:

“FDA’s current assessment is that BPA is safe at the very low levels that occur in some foods. This assessment is based on review by FDA scientists of hundreds of studies including the latest findings from new studies initiated by the agency.”

The remarkable thing is that the FDA actually declared that “BPA is safe.” They did not say there was no evidence of harm; they did not say there was no undue risk; they stated unequivocally that “BPA is safe at the very low levels that occur in some foods.”

FDA’s declaration is also based on “hundreds of studies,” which demonstrate the compound’s safety. So what’s going on here? Are the French looking at different sets of studies? Is the FDA research somehow not available to the agency’s regulatory peers around the globe? How could two ostensibly responsible regulatory agencies be so diametrically opposed in their assessment of BPA? Think about it:  French women are being told to not even touch something made with BPA while FDA declares it safe. That’s really pretty bizarre.

There is one thing that can and should guide your thinking on this.  FDA’s assessment is based on science. Lots and lots of science, including “… new studies initiated by the agency.” These are not studies by industry or activist peddlers of junk science, these are FDA studies. With all the bickering over BPA, the FDA just doesn’t have a dog in this fight.

Any thinking person knows that BPA has been a poster child for activists for many years. These are activists who will tell any fib and smear any good scientist whose research identifies something that is at odds with the evangelical fervor behind the anti-science movement that propels fear of BPA. And the fact that the irresponsible ANSES announcement comes days after the announcement of the EFSA’s public comment period frankly doesn’t pass the smell test.

The way we see it, this is palpable desperation by people who have made a living off of scaring people about BPA and are now faced with being repudiated by the science. We suspect this desperation will increase with time and the tactics of the anti-BPA crowd will grow only more preposterous.

We understand the people can get worried when they hear a radio report questioning the safety of the region’s water supply. We also understand that this thing called the “Internets” on which we can quickly look up scary-sounding words to learn that they might not be all that scary.

For example, the words” dihydrogen monoxide.” Bunch of scientific mumbo-jumbo for the scientifically illiterate, which we are sad to report seems to be a lot of people living in Lee County, Florida.

A couple of morning radio DJs took some liberties on Monday by cracking wise on their show that the county’s water supply had dihydrogen monoxide in it. Enough people panicked and called Lee County Utilities about it that the municipal government issued a media statement clarifying that the water was ok.

According to a report on Tampa Bay’s CBS affiliate,

“The station’s news immediately got the attention of Patty DiPiero from Lee County Utilities. She said Lee County residents began calling the utility this morning saying they heard on the station that county water was unsafe and should not be used for drinking, showering or for any use.

“DiPiero stressed in an email to media outlets that the utility was not having any issues with the water supply and the water is safe to use.

“’My understanding is it is a felony to call in a false water quality issue,’ Diane Holm, a public information officer for Lee County, said, due to the potential of such a false report to affect a large segment of Southwest Florida’s population.”

Now, it wasn’t smart of these jocks to say the water wasn’t safe, but what’s more concerning is the reaction of people who fire up their Google-machines at the drop of a hat (often to see videos of hats dropping onto kittens) but couldn’t be bothered to do a simple search and learn that dihydrogen monoxide is water.  We’d also like to take this opportunity to promote more and better science education in every single school in Lee County along with every other school in America.

But this is where is gets really scary: this story is illustrative of how easy it is to fool people with scientific names. And if it’s this easy for a couple of morning DJs to panic the population of Lee County, Florida, you get an idea of how easy it is for crusaders and activists to fool people about the rest of the stuff we’re consuming.  Whether it’s vaccines, common chemicals like bisphenol A or the food we eat, people would be well advised to learn a little about the science so they can make informed decisions instead of blindly freaking out over a dumb headline over an even dumber news article or blog post.  While we’re on the subject, it would behoove us all if the media got a clue on science reporting too.

This video link is an oldie but goodie from Penn and Teller about the lurking dangers of dihydrogen monoxide and environmental activists vs. joiners.

Finally, we’d like to highlight some of the comments on the original article posted on the Tampa Bay CBS station’s website as they do a great job summing it all up:

“The American public should be charged with felony stupidity.”

“Man that’s funny. Oh, no, ‘dihydrogen monoxide’ is coming out of my taps! Aieeeeee”

“The idea of this being an issue, is the REAL issue. It’s sad to see the the culmination of so many uneducated people. The fact of the deejays being suspended is shear panic on the owners part.
So what will be next, The terror of sodium in our food, or acetaminophen in our Tylenol.”

“Suspending them is a pathetic demonstration of the ignorance of station management and the listeners that reacted to the show hosts. Charged with a felony, seriously? How can you charge a person for actually being a tad more intelligent and informed?”

“So.. let me get this right: They use a term that pretty much any intelligent high schooler can figure out. Audience members (hopefully only a few) freak out because they are unaware it’s the FIRST of APRIL, and SCIENTIFIC TERMINOLOGY . They complain, realize they have been duped and basically feel stupid. The station management also is apparently unintelligent enough to properly field the calls and now they feel stupid and embarrassed… and their reaction is to suspend dj’s that are performing and have done jokes before. Is that right ? So basically.. management is lashing out because they just felt stupid. Hey… here’s an update.. you’re not proving yourself to be any smarter by suspending them. Ya know, this country would possibly be a lot further along if we didn’t keep punishing the bright ones because the ignorant are embarrassed. And please.. be aware.. being unaware, isn’t stupid…but getting angry because you slept thru chemistry class and FEEL like an idiot.. is stupid.”

Yup, that about covers it.

Whoa. Two consecutive posts in which we say complimentary things about the Silent Spring Institute? Check out the window for piglets with wings because that’s exactly what’s about to happen!

We love people who are passionate about their causes. Humdrumily supporting a cause isn’t very effective so we appreciate people who put their hearts and souls into what they believe. More than passion, though, we appreciate knowledge and sound science, which is why we’re so excited to note that a researcher from the Silent Spring Institute complimented a trio of FDA researchers on the work they’ve done into understanding BPA.

Trevor Butterworth writing in Forbes has the goods:

“So it came as something of a shock to the panel and the audience when, after the presentation by the FDA’s Daniel Doerge, Ruthann Rudel, an expert on endocrine disruption at the Silent Spring Institute (named after the Rachel Carson book which ignited the environmental movement) praised his research.

“’I actually just want to thank you for the work that you’ve done, because I’ve found your studies to be some of the most clarifying and helpful pieces of information in making my way through the bisphenol A woods,’ said Rudel.

‘To which Doerge replied, ‘I’ll take more questions like that.’”

Doerge is in charge of an FDA team that is looking into the pharmacokinetics of BPA. In layman’s terms, they’re looking at what happens when BPA is inside the body and how it interacts with everything in there. It’s a very complex field, and we don’t pretend to understand it but we’re sure glad the FDA has some smart people looking into it. Butterworth’s piece has an email interview he conducted with Doerge about his work, and we strongly encourage you to take the time to read it.

Here are some of the important basics of what they’re doing:

“In all species tested, the mother’s metabolism, the placenta, and the fetus itself systematically and efficiently deactivate BPA. And again – this is when you inject much higher levels of the chemical than we are exposed to in the real world. In those exposures that occur through food, less than one percent of BPA makes it into the human bloodstream.

“…The FDA’s pharmacokinetic studies are not over, but there is another way to understand their significance to the debate besides the tribute from Rudel (along with the fact that the FDA continues to state that BPA does not pose a risk at current exposure levels). Consider the following thought experiment. If BPA was a pill that targeted a disease, what would the pharmacokinetic studies tell a drug discovery team about its potential effectiveness? As noted at the conference, any lead compound that behaved like BPA would never make it into drug development because it simply wouldn’t get into the body in sufficient quantities.”

You’d think that with the significance of this research – and the praise it’s getting from an environmental think-tank that certainly has no reason to look kindly upon a chemical – would be big news. You’d be totally wrong.

NPR did one report that included mention of Doerge’s work.

So what is being reported? Take it away, Julie Gunlock at Independent Women’s Forum:

“BPA alarmism in places like mommy blogs and other high-traffic online publications.

“Women should ignore the alarmists and instead start reading up on the body of reassuring and highly respected research being done on BPA. Perhaps because of this newfound comity between former foes coupled with the continued good work of writers like Trevor Butterworth, we might see the good news spread.”

We passionately agree.

Joe Schwarcz, who we’re sure will be accused of being an apologist for the chemicals industry, has an interesting column in the Montreal Gazette. As always, we encourage you to read the whole thing – it’s a quick yet informative read.

First things first: Joe Schwarcz is not some kind of chemical-industry cheerleader. We want to make that point for him. As the Director of McGill University’s Office for Science & Society, he was approached by Dateline (NBC) to be interviewed for a piece on hormone “disruptors.” We’ll get to the broadcast later but we do want to include a bit from a blog Schwarcz wrote about it because it’s important to know where he’s coming from:

“I was glad they put in my comments about triclosan, which I really think should not be in soaps or toothpaste, because I was concerned that they would portray me as some sort of apologist for the chemical industry, which of course I am not.”

So Joe Schwarz – not an apologist for the chemical industry.

What Schwarcz is, is an individual with a great deal of common sense. A New York Times article from more than a year ago seems to be making the rounds with the anti-chemheads and it was sent to Mr. Schwarcz. If you don’t remember it, it’s the column from Nicholas Kristof who bought into the whole junk science scare tactics about how the everyday chemicals we encounter are turning us into mutants. The column had some particularly choice words about endocrine disruptors and bisphenol A (BPA).

Schwarcz, though, doesn’t buy it.

“To many, chemicals are the substances that insidiously invade our lives and shorten them.

“… The columnist was right about one thing. Chemicals do affect us! And they do so in every conceivable way. Take away oxygen and you die. Eat an improperly processed puffer fish, and the natural tetrodotoxin it harbours will kill you. If you have a headache, Aspirin comes in handy. And yes, chemicals that leach out from plastics can have hormonal effects. But ‘hormonal effect’ is not synonymous with ‘hormonal disruption.’ An effect on a cell in the laboratory cannot be uncritically extrapolated to what may happen in a living body.”

Schwarcz also highlights a study from Silent Spring Institute that showed how effective the human body is at getting rid of chemicals. Now, Rachel Carson would come back as an avenging poltergeist if anyone dared to accuse the Institute of being an apologist for the chemicals industry but the Institute’s findings on BPA – and other similar research – are consistently misinterpreted.

Here’s what Schwarcz writes about the Institute’s research:

“A recent study by the Silent Spring Institute, a non-profit research organization, is a case in point. Researchers enlisted 20 people who volunteered to have the amount of bisphenol A and phthalates in their urine measured before and after a change in their diet. For three days they agreed to avoid all canned and packaged products and to build their diet around fresh, organic food. And guess what. After three days, bisphenol A levels and phthalate levels in the subjects’ urine decreased by roughly 65 and 55 per cent respectively.”

The fear-mongering crowd looks at that and says, “AH-HA! Look at all the BPA in our bodies!” But those of us with common sense say, “WOW! Look at how well the body gets rid of this stuff!” If BPA really was some insidious chemical damaging us at a cellular level, research should indicate high levels of it remaining in our bodies well after we eliminate it from our diets. But that’s not what credible research is showing. Instead, within just hours of avoiding foods and products that either contain an infinitesimal amount of BPA or are packaged in a material that contains it, the levels in our bodies are significantly decreased.

Now, about the Dateline package we mentioned. BPA, of course, is one of their top villains. We had to chuckle of Schwarcz’s description of what he said that actually got included in the broadcast (58 seconds out of a 3 hour interview!) – we could have told him that it wouldn’t include comments that disputed the junk science narrative that BPA is destroying us from the inside out.

Here’s the big take-away from Schwarcz:

“They didn’t manage to include my comment that reducing extremely low levels to even lower ones has no clinical significance. I even gave an analogy: if you drink a cup of coffee you expect to find caffeine in the urine. If you then abstain it will vanish. Drink again and it’s back. So what? All you have shown is exposure which does not equate to risk. The presence of a chemical is not the same as presence of risk. But when you report results in percentages you can mislead easily.

“…Unfortunately they gave much more air time to Rick Smith of ‘Environmental Defense’ and his alarmist crony with their implied message that that ‘hormone disruptors’ are undermining our health. I had made it clear that ‘hormonal activity’ and ‘hormone disruption’ are not equivalent. I also pointed out that there are some 11,000 compounds that are known to have endocrine activity and if any one of these were investigated to the same extent as BPA or the phthalates, similar issues would crop up.”

So there you have it, folks. Junk science and scare tactics continue to win out over common sense and sound science. But we do appreciate Mr. Schwarcz’s efforts to correct the record.