When life’s a beach – and also when it’s not – we all need a sunscreen that gets the job done.   With skin cancer the most common of all malignancies and bogus claims and hype fogging the sun care products aisle, you’d think the federal Food and Drug Administration would step up the pace to issue sunscreen safety standards.

But you’d be wrong.  Last July 15, Environmental Working Group President Ken Cook wrote FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg, urging her to wrap up the agency’s safety rules, in the works since 1978.  (That’s not a misprint.  1978. The Carter administration.  “The Deer Hunter” won the Oscar for Best Picture.  The Iranian Revolution ignited.  Shag hair, disco fever fashion…  Well, you get the idea.)

“In the absence of formal guidance from FDA,” Cook wrote, “companies continue to make billions of dollars annually misleading consumers about the protection from the sun their products offer.”

After nearly six months, the agency has responded.   A letter from FDA policy analyst Jeff D. O’Neill has just landed in Cook’s inbox.

“Following a thorough review of public comments received in response to the 1999 final rule and reviews an analyses of other data and information related to protection against UVA radiation, we published a sunscreen proposed rule in 2007,” O’Neill wrote.

The FDA usually receives about 100 comments on any proposed rule.  In the case of the sunscreen proposal, consumers, health advocates and affected industries filed nearly 3,000 comments, some with technical data attached.

The agency might have taken such unusual interest  as a mandate for action and ramped up to wrestle all those submissions to the ground.

But nooooooo.

O’Neill explained:

Although we understand your concern regarding the protracted nature of this process, we trust that you will appreciate the need for us to continue to fully investigate new research and development for sunscreen products, permit adequate opportunity for public comment, and weigh research and development fairly and with full input from FDA subject area experts as well as industry stakeholders and the American public.

We take that to mean — don’t hold your breath.

The agency’s logic is downright baffling.  It seems that the higher priority the public attaches to an issue,  the less likely the agency is to make an actual decision.

EWG will keep updating its own sunscreen database, which now analyzes close to 2,000 products.  And we’ll continue to write FDA and encourage our readers to do so.   Science never stops.  Research and development are always coming up with innovations.    Why can’t the FDA  issue responsible guidance on the current crop of sunscreens and their marketing claims?

This year – preferably before beach season – would be about right.

Then, as new sun protection chemicals come on line and agency’s scientists refine their understanding of the way these substances work, the FDA can issue updates.

There is this cool new communications medium called the Internet….

Michael Potter, who runs a company that cans organic foods in Michigan, has a problem. He doesn’t want to sell Eden Food’s products in cans lined with epoxy resin containing bisphenol A (BPA), a synthetic estrogen linked to a variety of potential health hazards.

But, as he told Washington Post reporter Lyndsey Layton, trying to find out what’s in the linings he buys is an exercise in frustration – even though he pays for the stuff.

“Inevitably, you end up speaking to a large law firm inside the Beltway that says you don’t have the right to know,” Potter lamented.

It sounds hard to believe, but Potter is correct. Makers of canned foods can’t necessarily find out if certain chemicals, including BPA, are in the liners of the cans they sell to millions of people every day.

In the case of BPA, of course, it doesn’t help that until recently, the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) considered the plastics chemical to be “generally regarded as safe” in food. That gave companies a pass on having to disclose whether BPA was in their cans. FDA made an about-face last month, intensifying its investigation of BPA as a food contaminant, warning the public to avoid BPA-contaminated food and encouraging industry to search for alternate can linings and other BPA-infused packaging.

Making things worse, the federal Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) hamstrings the downstream industries that do care about the chemicals in their products. For 33 years, that law has given industry free rein to lace the environment, and people’s blood, with an untold number of persistent chemicals, even as diseases associated with many of these contaminants skyrocketed in the U.S. population.

Under this outdated 1976 law, chemical makers have been pretty much free to cloak the identity of thousands of toxic chemicals — including their makeup, possible health risks, amounts produced and how they are used. All manufacturers have to do to hide basic information about a chemical is declare that it’s “Confidential Business Information.” (CBI).

For consumers, the current approach to “protecting” the public from hazardous contaminants is a lose-lose proposition. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gives chemicals a stamp of approval without anyone having to prove them safe, and then lets industry hide critical information about them from everyone. Even the President of the United States, barring some national security emergency, would be restricted from warning the public about potential health risks from a chemical if he reviewed the “confidential” information.

Last week the EPA’s Office of Inspector General, the agency’s in-house watchdog, released a damning report that ticked off a litany of serious, systemic problems with TSCA. It concluded that:

Given the limitations of the review process, EPA’s assurance that new chemicals or organisms introduced into commerce do not pose unreasonable risks to workers, consumers, or the environment is not supported by data or actual testing.

What if prescription drug manufacturers were allowed to introduce new products without first running them through rigorous safety tests?

Chemicals aren’t widgets. Many are complex mixes of sometimes-volatile ingredients bound together to produce a certain reaction — hardening plastics, in the case of BPA. Americans need a federal regulatory system with the muscle to review and approve all chemicals before they’re used, so those that could pose risks to health and the environment don’t end up in products like baby bottles and sippy cups, pizza boxes, cribs, rugs, child car seats – and in our bodies.

And of course, Coke is touting its “Bottle of the Future”  — the PlantBottle, whose cachet is its 30 percent plant-based material content. (If you dig deep into the Coca-Cola website , you’ll find that the company has yet to confirm “preliminary research” suggesting that the PlantBottle’s carbon footprint is any lower than PET (polyethylene terephthalate)  polyester, the usual material for  Coca-Cola and other plastic drink bottles.  But both Pet and PB bottles are recyclable, Coke says.)

Still, Advertising Age’s headline — Coca-Cola Goes Completely Green at Olympics – is a bit too sweeping.   Coca-Cola’s soft drink cans are still lined with an epoxy resin containing bisphenol A (BPA), a petrochemical derivative and synthetic estrogen which readily leaches into food and drink.  On its website,   Coca-Cola defends this practice by asserting that “BPA is used to make the linings of cans to prevent spoilage and protect foods and beverages from direct contact with the can.”

The company adds that the U.S. and other industrialized nations believe that “the level of exposure to BPA that results from consuming canned foods and beverages poses no risk to the health of consumers.”

Well, not so much.  This was an accurate reflection of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s attitude under the regulation-averse Bush administration.

But things have changed.  Last month, reacting to a cascade of research studies linking BPA to serious health conditions, senior FDA leaders appointed by President Obama issued a strong warning to the public to avoid the chemical.  FDA officials announced a series of investigations of BPA safety, meanwhile committing the agency, on its own and in conjunction with Canadian counterparts, to “support” food processing industry efforts to find a suitable replacement for BPA in can linings, particularly for canned infant formula.

Right now,  the Japanese canning industry voluntarily uses non-BPA can linings, but nearly all other major canners in industrialized nations use epoxy resin with BPA.  Scientists and policy-makers worldwide are stepping up research into BPA and into alternatives for cans.   Later this year, the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations are planning to convene an international “Expert Consultation on BPA.”

Ironically, while hanging tough on BPA in cans, Coca-Cola  doesn’t mind using the BPA controversy to market its  lines of bottled drinks:  its website assures consumers that “BPA is not used in the manufacture of the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic water and soft drink bottles used by The Coca-Cola Company.”

PepsiCo, another global giant that makes Pepsi-Cola, Gatorade, Aquafina, Tropicana and hundreds more beverages, takes a similar tack.  PepsiCo is courting   environmentalists and other advocates of corporate responsibility with its ambitious Refresh Project, which promises to dedicate $20 million to good causes.

Like rival Coca-Cola, Pepsi is keenly aware of environmentalists’ campaigns against the burgeoning plastic bottle glut.  Pepsi promises to develop “sustainable packaging strategies” by encouraging recycling and coming up with“biodegradable and compostable packaging solutions.”

Pepsi also says it is “eliminating environmentally sensitive materials and processes from our packaging.”

So – what’s in those Pepsi bottles?   The company says “the vast majority of Pepsi’s plastic bottles are made from PET (polyethylene terephthalate). A few of our products are packaged in a plastic called High Density Polyethylene (HDPE), which is a multi-layered material. Please be assured that all of these plastics do not contain BPA and are perfectly safe for consumption.”

Well then – what’s in the cans?  Pepsi is  silent on that question.  At least Coca-Cola’s website acknowledges the BPA controversy and takes a position.  Pepsi’s position is ostrich.  On Feb. 3, we emailed and telephoned Pepsi customer service and media relations to ask if Pepsi had managed to come with a non-BPA can lining.

So far – nothing.  Pepsi hasn’t returned our calls.  We can only assume this means Pepsi, like Coke and most other canners outside Japan, uses BPA-based epoxy resin.

Obviously major corporations have become convinced that going green is good for their customers, the planet and their bottom lines.   Fine, but a little healthy skepticism is always in order.  As long as the stuff in the cans is contaminated with a troubling industrial chemical like BPA, thinking people won’t consider it truly green.

On Friday, in a dramatic about-face, FDA officials announced they would “support” – meaning jawbone — the food industry to shift to materials free of BPA, a synthetic estrogen that leaches readily into whatever food or drink it touches and is linked to a range of serious health problems.  Though the agency avoided labeling BPA a danger to public health — a declaration that would require immediate government action – its explanation was studded with more red flags, traffic cones, flares and police tape than a pile-up on the four-lane.

Baby bottles, Nalgene, Camelbak now BPA-free

When most people see a wreck in the distance, they start looking for an off-ramp.  Companies know this, and the market moves.  Major baby bottle producers and sports bottle manufacturers such as Nalgene and Camelbak have already stopped using polycarbonate plastic, whose integral ingredient is BPA.

Canning industry resisting change

The canning industry has been unwilling to abandon BPA-based epoxy resin for its metal can linings, pleading expense and lack of feasible alternatives.  But on Friday, Dr. John Rost, chairman of the North American Metal Packaging Association,  sounded a conciliatory note, saying the canners “stand ready to help FDA in any process changes they feel are needed to better ensure the safety of packaged foods.”

If FDA presses ahead, the industry will have a tough time explaining why it is continuing to resist reformulating its can linings.

BPA in adults linked to heart disease, diabetes

Meanwhile, more studies about BPA’s impact on human health are lending a new urgency to the BPA issue.  Last week, British scientists reported that they had dug into population studies by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and come up with a disturbing discovery:  people with high concentrations of BPA in their urine were more than twice as likely to report they had been diagnosed with heart disease or diabetes as people with the least BPA. Such evidence is necessarily circumstantial, since it would be immoral and illegal to  expose people deliberately to a suspected toxic substance.  Study co-author David Melzer of the University of Exeter cautioned that since only 159 of the 2,605 Americans tested by CDC reported cardiovascular disease, “larger studies are needed to make accurate estimates.”

Even so, Melzer said, “we expect these figures underestimate” the real impact of BPA on heart disease and other health problems, since the CDC urine tests amount to a snapshot of an individual’s BPA level at  a single  moment and don’t measure that person’s true BPA exposure over a lifetime.

Research on BPA accelerating

More research on BPA and human health is in the pipeline.  Linda Birmbaum, director of the National Institute of  Environmental Health Sciences  (NIEHS), has  devoted $14 milllion from the Obama administration’s emergency stimulus package to an investigation of BPA and human health.   Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson has ordered a fast-track risk assessment of BPA and five other high-profile chemicals, with an eye to stepped-up regulation.

All of which means that BPA is going to stay in the headlines, and not in a good way.  Looking down the road, we don’t know when, exactly, the FDA is going to take action on  this worrisome endocrine system-disrupting chemical.  But one way or another, we think its days in bottles and cans are numbered.

Remember Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in Network?

People are mad as hell about contamination in their food, and they’re not going to take it much longer.

Now a ground-breaking study released in the journal Human Reproduction offers what its authors call “the first evidence that exposure to BPA in the workplace could have an adverse effect on male sexual dysfunction.”

BPA factory workers suffer sexual problems

The scientific team, underwritten by Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Research in Oakland, CA., spent five years studying 634 Chinese factory workers whose bodies had been severely contaminated with BPA.

Animal studies link BPA to extraordinary array of subtle but serious chronic health problems, including impairment of the ability to think and behave normally, reproductive and cardiovascular system damage, cancer, diabetes, asthma and obesity. Evidence of BPA’s impact on human health has been more elusive – which is why the Kaiser Permanente study is making headlines around the globe.

After a year of being bombarded with BPA, the Chinese workers reported disturbing sexual problems: four times as much erectile dysfunction and seven times as many ejaculation difficulties as a control group, the Kaiser team found.

Nearly all Americans are BPA-positive

Most people don’t experience BPA exposure nearly as intense as the factory workers. But nearly all Americans test positive for low-level BPA contamination, as evidenced by body burden testing by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Environmental Working Group and other academic and non-profit organizations.

As Kaiser research team leader De-Kun Li, MD, Ph.D., put it, the China workers study “raises the question: Is there a safe level for BPA exposure, and what is that level?”

AMA takes up BPA battle

Many scientists specializing in hormonal and reproductive systems say there’s no such thing as a “safe” dose of BPA, a powerful endocrine-disrupting chemical. Earlier this week, the American Medical Association Board of Delegates resolved to work with the federal government to minimize the public’s exposure to BPA and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals. The measure was proposed by the Endocrine Society, which, with 14,000 hormone researchers and medical specialists in more than 100 countries, recently warned that “even infinitesimally low levels of exposure [to endocrine-disrupting chemicals] –indeed, any level of exposure at all– may cause endocrine or reproductive abnormalities, particularly if exposure occurs during a critical developmental window. Surprisingly, low doses may even exert more potent effects than higher doses.”

“The AMA represents a very important constituency of physicians who have a lot of credibility and clout,” says Andrea Gore, Ph.D., a University of Texas-Austin researcher who co-authored the Endocrine Society statement. “If members of the AMA can now get behind the statement and actually affect regulations, then I think we can consider it a victory.”

It’s in the cans

Most of the BPA in Americans’ bodies is believed to come from leaching from BPA-based epoxy food can linings and polycarbonate baby and drink bottles, sippy cups and other food containers. Under pressure from EWG and other scientific and environmental health groups, the federal Food and Drug Administration is weighing proposals to ban the chemical in food packaging.

Because of FDA inaction, last October EWG president Ken Cook wrote major infant formula and canned food producers urging them to take voluntary measures to remove BPA from their can linings.

20 of 28 canned food brands contaminated

Laboratory tests commissioned by EWG in 2007 found BPA in 20 out of 28 brands of canned food and drink, including B&M, Bush’s Best, Campbell’s Condensed (soup), Campbell’s Chunky, Campbell’s SpaghettiOs, Chef Boyardee, Chicken of the Sea, Coca-Cola, Del Monte, Dole, Ensure, Green Giant, Kroger store brand, Libby’s, Nestle Carnation, Pepsi-Cola, Progresso, S&W, Slim-Fast, Swanson and Wolfgang Puck.

An EWG survey found that all four leading makers of liquid infant formula sold in North America used BPA to line their cans. These included Nestle (Good Start), Ross-Abbot (Similac and Isomil), Mead Johnson (Enfamil), and PBM (maker of store-brand formulas sold at Target, Kroger and dozens of other retailers).

Last week, Consumers Union, an advocacy organization, reported that its laboratory tests had found BPA in canned food packaged under the brand names Campbell’s Condensed, Progresso, Del Monte and Nestle.

Top environmental regulator, scientist act on BPA

The FDA’s plans are, as yet, unclear. But other top administration scientists and regulators are zeroing in on BPA. Lisa Jackson, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has identified BPA as a priority for regulatory action. And Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, has recently committed $30 million in federal stimulus funds to research the many unanswered questions about BPA.

We know this much: with every day that passes, the cases against BPA hardens, like the plastics it makes.

We’re also blogging on Huffington Post. Visit us there.

Photo credit: abarndweller

During the Bush administration, the FDA contended that traces of BPA leached into food and drink from packaging were safe, even for pregnant women, infants and young children.   Despite contradictory findings from the National Toxicology Program (NTP), which last year said that BPA might damage the brains, reproductive systems and behavior of fetuses, infants and children, the FDA has refused to restrict BPA use in food packaging, provoking protests from scientists and environmental and health advocates.

Since President Obama took office, the agency’s leadership has given mixed signals, on one hand promising a “fresh look” at BPA safety but suggesting, on the other, that further studies could delay decisive regulatory action.

FDA officials have indicated they would detail their plans for the BPA issue later this month.   Meanwhile, several developments are intensifying the spotlight on BPA — and putting FDA on the spot:

• Thirty-three university and independent experts on BPA and other chemicals that disrupt the endocrine system have written FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg urging her not to postpone restrictions on BPA while agency scientists conduct a five-year, $10 million study of the chemical.
• The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) has awarded $30 million in federal stimulus funds to fill research gaps on BPA.
• Consumer Reports, published by the non-profit Consumers Union, has made public new tests of canned foods, finding that nearly all brands tested contained BPA that had migrated from the containers. Even foods labeled “organic” and packaged in “BPA-free” cans showed low levels of BPA contamination, Consumers Union said.

BPA leaching in canned goods

The Consumers Union project augments and amplifies 2007 tests by Environmental Working Group that found BPA in more than half of 97 cans of common canned goods, including  infant formula.  BPA, made from feedstock tracing back to the petrochemical benzene, is an integral ingredient in epoxy resin, used in industrial paints and coatings, including food and beverage can linings. The chemical is also essential to the manufacture of polycarbonate plastic, found in thousands of products, from computer and cell phone casings and hard hats to water jugs and, until recently, baby bottles and sports bottles.

BPA-based synthetics are notoriously unstable.  Studies documenting widespread BPA migration into the food supply have moved an increasing number of scientists and environmentalists to press for enforceable regulatory curbs.

“If you can demonstrate that a chemical is endocrine-active,” said R. Thomas Zoeller, Ph.D. an endocrine system specialist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and lead author of the 33-scientists’ letter to FDA chief Hamburg, “then I think you need to look very serious at allowing every man, woman and child in this country to come in contact with it, period.”

More funds for basic research

On a second track,  NIEHS director Linda Birnbaum, Ph.D., who also heads the National Toxicology Program,  using stimulus money to  fund basic research into how BPA and other chemicals that act like hormones in the body may be causing subtle changes in vital systems and gene expression, including behavioral changes, obesity, diabetes, reproductive system cancers adn other disorders, asthma, cardiovascular diseases and gene-level changes that transcend generations.

“The kind of sophisticated research that is being sponsored by NIEHS is required for us to understand endocrine disruptors in a broader way, “ Zoeller said,  “not just BPA and not just estrogen.  There are tentacles of endocrine disruptors in the environment that are acting like weak drugs,  that are being exposed to everybody on a daily basis.”

Significantly, the NIEHS stimulus awards are going to a number of researchers who have been highly critical of the FDA. Among them: Frederick vom Saal, Ph.D., a biologist at the University of Missouri at Columbia whose research team is credited with producing the first hard evidence that low doses of BPA caused irreversible damage to the male reproductive system.

“Even if BPA were banned in all products immediately,” said Vom Saal, “there would still be billions of pounds of this product out in the environment. There is a need for research to identify in more detail what the hazards are, what the molecular mechanisms are, particularly looking at infants. We have very little information about how much BPA is actually present in infants.”

Lynn Goldman on board at FDA

To date, the FDA has not moved aggressively, as its critics had hoped.   Last August, EWG  asked Hamburg to replace Mitchell Cheeseman, Ph.D., the agency’s lead scientist for the BPA review, on grounds that he was reported to have consulted closely with chemical industry officials and that his team continued to rely heavily on just two chemical industry studies that found BPA exposure to be relatively benign.

A course correction may be in the works.  EWG has learned that Jesse Goodman, M.D., M.P.H., the FDA’s Science Advisor, has engaged Lynn Goldman, M.D., M.P.H., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a pioneer in research on endocrine-disrupting chemicals and a leading voice for strong environmental health policy, to act as a part-time consultant on BPA and related issues.

Industry opposition expected

Any effort by FDA to restrict BPA exposure is sure to be fought by chemical makers, who reap an estimated $6 billion yearly in global sales of BPA, and food processors hoping to avoid the expenses of developing alternative packaging and retooling assembly lines.

Advocates for a ban on BPA in food packaging argue that it constitutes a small percentage of the BPA market – and in any case, public health should take priority over corporate bottom lines, as the federal Pure Food Act intended.

Vom Saal:  FDA legal threshold met

“If you have a thousand papers and they’re showing that this estrogenic chemical impacts every system you look at adversely,” says Vom Saal, “ how can you possibly say, we’re going to tell you it’s safe?  We cannot tell the American public this chemical is safe.”

It appears as though the food industry is starting to ship fresh produce on plastic pallets, each made with 3.5 pounds of pure decabromodiphenyl ether – Deca for short, the neurotoxic cousin of banned flame retardants penta- and octabromodiphenyl ether.

Without Deca, plastic pallets are such a fire hazard that warehouses where they are stacked need major fire safety system upgrades.

The problem comes when fruits and vegetables are hydro-cooled, placed on pallets and either dunked or showered with water to preserve freshness.  Typically the water is recycled.   According to the federal Food and Drug Administration,  Deca can migrate from the pallets into the water and contaminate the produce with its residue.

FDA officials say they aren’t sure plastic pallets are actually being used for hydro-cooling. But I doubt they’ve looked very hard.  Perhaps the FDA should Google the largest purveyor of plastic pallets, iGPS.  Its website brags  that its clients include  General Mills, Borders Melon Company, PepsiCo, Cott, Okray Family Farms and Martoni Farm.  The company says that Dole Foods and Kraft Foods are conducting trials of plastic pallets.

Is this hard?

If these companies are  hydro-cooling produce stored in plastic pallets, the FDA would consider the practice “unapproved” and Deca-contaminated fruits and veggies “adulterated.”

We’re not saying this is happening.  But it could be.

It’s the FDA’s job to find out.