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TechnoratiToxic Chemicals in Consumer Products: Latest Scare Isn't the Last
Parents should be able to buy a baby bottle without worrying about health hazards. That standard requires a change in the system.
Last month, within a day of each other, Wal-Mart promised to stop carrying baby bottles with bisphenol-A (BPA) -- a toxic chemical that has received recent attention -- and Nalgene announced it will stop making its signature water bottles from the unsafe plastic. Toys 'R' Us and Babies 'R' Us have also have jumped on the bandwagon, agreeing to carry only BPA-free products by the end of this year.
The swift action from leading retailers came after the Canadian government labeled BPA as toxic. The science shows us that low-dose exposure to the toxic chemical may be linked to obesity, diabetes, breast cancer and other diseases, as well as early onset of puberty.
These health effects concerned Sen. Sandy Rummel, DFL-White Bear Lake, and Rep. Karen Clark, DFL-Minneapolis, and spurred them to author a bill that would provide a sigh of relief for worried parents. The Safe Baby Products bill would phase out BPA and another hard-to-pronounce toxic chemical, phthalates, from children's products.
Wouldn't it be nice to go into any store in Minnesota and know that any baby bottle for sale there is safe?
The shifting market for toxic plastic comes just months after the explosion of recalls due to lead-painted toys and lead-contaminated vinyl in children's toys, lunchboxes and other products. What's going on?
Each of these announcements signals a much larger problem with the U.S. government's oversight of chemicals used in everyday consumer goods. "[T]he U.S. regulatory system for toxic industrial chemicals is not effective and is a threat to public health," says Donald Kennedy, the former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and current editor of Science.
It's not just a question of a few errant baby bottles.
Industry has tried to make "regulation" a dirty word. But regulation often is necessary to protect public health, particularly the health of children who cannot advocate for themselves. Kids are exposed to various chemicals, starting in the womb, and recent testing shows that every one of us has significant levels of these chemicals in our bodies.
Consumers are now burdened with finding safe products for their children. While some retailers carry only the safer products, parents should be able to go into any store and be assured that the baby bottles and sippy cups and toys do not contain synthetic hormones or heavy metals like lead. Sadly, such assurance is lacking.
That's why this isn't the last we'll hear about unsafe children's products. We will have more recalls in the months and years to come. We have a broken system, and we will have to change the way the government regulates chemicals before we can be sure the products we buy for our children and families are safe.
In the interim, states are picking up where the federal government has failed to protect public health and started to target the phase-out of the most toxic chemicals in consumer products. Minnesota legislators can act swiftly to eliminate bisphenol-A from children's products by voting in favor of the Safe Baby Products Bill. Consumers and parents should expect no less.
David Wallinga, M.D., is director of food and health at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Lindsay Dahl is coordinator for the Healthy Legacy, a statewide coalition of 29 organizations dedicated to "safe products, made safely."
© 2008 Star Tribune
13 Comments so far
Show AllWhere are you going to toss billions of tons of this stuff that is won't have an adverse affect of a living thing, the moon?
Great, then we'll have a polluted moon that acts crazy like our environment has been doing lately. It'll end up being as hot as the sun or something. Its crazy how us humans continue to destroy everything we touch.
Johnny Blaze
http://www.halocigs.com
This is another shameful health scare.
The authors misrepresent the science. The science is very clear. There are no demonstrated harms to humans. If you are a rat, maybe you should be concerned. As an aside, rats are not little humans. Chocolate is toxic to my dog but I can eat it. Inferring harm to humans from a rat study is a giant leap.
This health scare is innocuous, so I frankly don't care if you throw out your plastic. What happens with health scares that are not so innocuous? For example, vaccines and autism? This is a health scare with dire consequences as some parents refuse to vaccinate their children.
"therefore diminishing returns for stockholders"
considering the incentive packages many CEOs get I don't think there is much concern for the average stockholder.
>> The capitalists' motto has always been and is, "Profits before people." <<
Yep ... any measure of safety (outside of the "market taking care of inferior products") would add cost, therefore diminishing returns for stockholders.
We need to get away from the religion of Dowism. Worship of the market is a big part of this.
The capitalists' motto has always been and is, "Profits before people."
This article points to a very general problem in our society-consumer products are very often unsafe but Americans will not respond UNLESS
their kids are directly in harms way.
Except for second hand smoke from cigarettes.
Oh . . . then there's emissions from diesel engines that annually give 300,000 kids asthma.
And there's the forgotten kids with no food or health care.
And there's . . . .
you get the idea
Here's an interesting idea-the very wealthy (top 1% of the income level) in this country are using the rest of us as troglodytes to swelter away in a sewer of toxic poisons so the transfer of wealth from top to bottom can continue.
Bankrolling a Presidential Campaign The Obama Bubble Agenda
By PAM MARTENS
http://www.counterpunch.org/
Is it still possible to buy glass baby bottles? What happened to wooden toys? Making your own toys? Imagine...
Industry has tried to make "regulation" a dirty word. But regulation often is necessary to protect public health
If the corporations weren't predatory psychopaths, we wouldn't need to regulate them... but since they put profit first and foremost before anything else, we can not trust them.
Here's a documentary that was pulled from Google
"The World According to Monsanto" aired in Europe and was placed on Google, subsequently pulled.
Here is the youtube link to the MONSANTO WORLD documentary part 1
Shocking World By Monsanto - Must see!!! - Part 1
http://youtube.com/watch?v=CiPW7EKn8nY
Heh, plastics are making people fat? Nice try.
Check this story which appeared in the SJ Mercury News this morning for the utter criminality of this topic.
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_9167502?IADID=Search-www.mercurynews.com-www.mercurynews.com
Stanford researcher stumbled on potential chemical threat
By Patrick May
Mercury News
It was back in 1993 when Stanford endocrinologist David Feldman accidentally backed into his startling discovery: potentially dangerous molecules known as bisphenol A, or BPA, were leaching from the plastic flasks he and his colleagues were using for experiments.
"We were growing yeast in the flask to see if we could find estrogenic molecules," said Feldman, who was doing experiments on steroid hormones like estrogen. They found them, but not where they expected. After sterilizing the empty flask with very high heat and pressure, Feldman said he "discovered the molecules must be leeching from the plastic, because they weren't coming from the yeast."
No one paid much attention. But 15 years - and billions of plastic bottles - later, Feldman's discovery seems downright ominous.
Wal-Mart recently announced it will stop selling baby bottles containing BPA early next year, and Nalgene announced it will phase out production of its hard-plastic sports bottles that contain BPA. Governments are also taking notice - Canada placed exposure limits on the chemical, calling it "toxic" to human health. And federal toxicology investigators in the United States recently concluded there is "some concern" that fetuses, infants and children may be harmed by BPA, commonly found in juice bottles, campers' water containers and even that icon of the modern cubicle world - the office water cooler. The FDA, meanwhile, says it has found no links between BPA and health problems.
The problem, Feldman said, is polycarbonate, the clear, sturdy plastic found in thousands of items on grocery-store shelves, including food cans lined with polycarbonate-laced epoxy resin. And it all first surfaced when Feldman heated that plastic flask in his lab.
"That set off an alarm in my head," he said. "Because when BPA was first synthesized, it was known to be structurally connected to DES, or diethylstilbestrol. And 20 years after mothers had been treated with DES to prevent miscarriages, some of their grown children were developing vaginal cancers from that therapy."
The repercussions of what Feldman and research associates Aruna Krishnan and Lazlo Tokes had stumbled upon by accident were alarming. Since BPA leaches from the plastic when it's sterilized and perhaps when washed with certain detergents, the potential for health risks could be immense, even though industry groups say there are no serious health risks associated with plastic bottles containing BPA.
"I'm not an alarmist, and I'm not saying that drinking from plastic bottles will cause breast cancer," said Feldman, who advises his own children not to put plastic containers in the microwave or dishwasher and to limit the amount of canned foods they consume. "But I am worried about the effects of BPA on babies, expectant mothers and fetuses. To me, it's better to be safe than sorry, and we should at least know when people are exposed to this."
So why did it take 15 years for the world to notice?
"Our discovery was a big deal at first, even in Japan," said Feldman, who at a 1994 symposium in Washington, D.C., presented a paper titled "Estrogens in Unexpected Places: Possible Implications for Researchers and Consumers." Feldman said that while many other scientists built upon his research and continue to this day to explore the effects of BPA, initial attempts to push the industry to do more studies and implement safeguards came slowly.
"Why didn't it move faster? Politics, I think. There's a lot of money involved. Billions of pounds of this stuff is being made," he said. "So there's not much incentive by industry to do anything. And scientists can only say so much."
Feldman, who at 69 is still at Stanford but no longer researching BPA, said he's encouraged by the growing precautions taken by industry and government, even if a clear link between health risks and BPA in polycarbonate and perhaps other kinds of plastic has not been conclusively established.
"Maybe the BPA doesn't hurt us or kill us," he said. "But there have been studies where mice and rats are exposed to it, and they're finding changes in their prostate and breast tissue. The question is, how does that translate into human use? And we don't yet know the answer."
And much of American makeup has chemicals in it that are banned in Europe and Teflon is dangerous etc. etc.