by celebdu
Boston Globe, Times, others: How much did FDA shift on BPA?
[Via Knight Science Journalism Tracker]
Over the weekend, the government announced that it would launch a $30 million study of the chemical bisphenol A, or BPA, to determine whether it’s safe in food and beverage containers, including baby bottles.
The FDA has also changed its position on BPA–but what exactly has it done? The coverage offers multiple interpretations.
Beth Daley of The Boston Globe paints a relatively soft portrait of the FDA’s action, although she does get baby bottles in the lede:
Acknowledging there is “some concern’’ that a chemical found in baby bottles and infant sipping cups could cause adverse heath effects in children, Food and Drug Administration officials pledged yesterday to study the chemical far more closely but said there was not enough evidence to further regulate it.
Lyndsey Layton of The Washington Post wrote a lede with considerably more oomph, saying the FDA”reversed” itself:
The Food and Drug Administration has reversed its position on the safety of Bisphenol A, a chemical found in plastic bottles, soda cans, food containers and thousands of consumer goods, saying it now has concerns about health risks.
Andrew Zajac in The Los Angeles Times wrote that FDA said the chemical “merited further study” but “no immediate restrictions on its use.” And Denise Grady at The New York Times wrote that the FDA “in a shift of position” was “expressing concerns” about bisphenol A, which it had “declared safe in 2008.”
The varying interpretations turn, I suppose, on whether “some concern” should be read as SOME concern, or some CONCERN. In the past, the FDA expressed little or no concern, so you might argue that any expression of concern was a big shift, or even a reversal. The other interpretation would be that the FDA had expressed some concern, but no particular alarm.
I’ll go out on a bit of a limb here, as someone who has written about the possible dangers of BPA in the past, and argue that this is a bit of an under-covered story. Environmental groups have expressed great alarm, and industry groups have tracked them very closely with press releases rebutting every argument. I’m making this claim without looking back over years of coverage; it’s just a feeling I have from being involved in the coverage. It was a little too easy to get a scoop on a new development, which leads me to think that not enough people were competing to cover this.
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I was amazed also. Lots of talk about what the FDA news meant, lots of opinions, when the facts were right there from a story that came out 2 days earlier. I wrote about it on my other blog, Path to Sustainable, but that blog is not has highly traveled as this one is.
As I mentioned ther, I have written about Bisphenol A (BPA) a lot. In fact, I thought that the results of this study, where BPA caused sexual problems in men, would have been enough to change the FDA’s views. Unfortunately, BPA can not be regulated at all by the FDA because it was put in the generally considered safe category 40 years ago. Chemicals in this group are completely outside the regulatory grasp of the FDA. AIn’t that great?
I am on the board of a non=profit now called the Sustainable Path Foundation. Back in 2004, we instituted the inaugural series of seminars that we continue to this day. The first speaker was Pete Myers, now head of Environmental Health Sciences. A major part of his discussion was on the current state of research on chemicals such as Bisphenol A. His seminar was a real eye-opener to y as a scientist.
That is because BPA was originally developed as an estrogen mimic but was not the best one so it was put on the shelf. Then someone, who was only interested in tis ability to make plastics, not its biological activity, picked it to use in polycarbonate bottle. Since it was in an inert plastic, there should be no effects.
But in the late 90s, it was found that BPA leached out of these bottle. And it had direct biological effects that could be seen in rodents. In fact, and this was the mouth -dropping thing for a scientist, was that it could be found in the water given to rats, if polycarbonate bottle were used instead of glass. So, any animal could be exposed to BPA, without any real knowledge of the researcher.
This was demonstrated when labs tried to replicate the initial research showing an effect of BPA. These labs saw little effect of BPA, not because BPA had no effect but because the control mice, which supposedly got no BPA, were, in fact, getting BPA from the water.
This actually would have ramifications across many mouse studies, because the control mice would often also be getting an estrogen disruptor. In essence, they were not really control mice at all.
Of course, the real concern for most of the scientists in the audience was that we had been using Nalgene plastic bottles since before the 70s. Using them as water bottles to drink out of!! Supposedly made out of nice, inert plastic, they were readily available and just the right size. In fact, Nalgene saw this and created the Nalgene bottle used for such a long time by hikers. But we all DRANK out of these bottle, just like the lab mice did.
Nalgene is transitioning away from these BPA-containing polycarbonate bottles (good for them) because I would not have drank another mouthful of water from a polycarbonate bottle.
The other thing that Myers showed was that exposure to estrogen disrupting chemicals during only a very short period of fetal development, had lifelong consequences on gene expression. Thus, two identical mice, only one exposed before birth, had very different expression pattern for a set of proteins. And the difference continued through out their lifespan.
Simply removing future exposure may not have any effect. The damage is already done.
The effects seen in mice from exposure to BPA –increased weight, diabetes – are also things seen in the last 40 years in humans. So we have a chemical that, if present at the right time during development, completely changes lifetime gene expression patterns, resulting in overweight, diabetic animals.
Yet, the FDA is completely unable to regulate it. And, guess what, the relevant companies are doing the tobacco company scam to keep it that way.
How come little of this context ever appears in the mainstream media? BPA is a scary compound and its makers are using tactics that are associated with known dissemblers like tobacco companies.
Why not remember this, including the companies in this list, and wonder why more reporters do not connect the dots:
Government is funny; there is a Democratic version of the facts, and a Republican version of the facts. And a Limbaugh version, and a Howard Dean version. And so on. Science writers are in possession of what I guess I now have to call actual facts, or real facts. Let’s not let the mouthpieces control the “facts,” when we know better.
