It’s titled “Toxic Environmental Threats to Children’s Development: What We Know and What We Can Do.” The Saturday program will include presentations by several nationally prominent experts in environmental medicine, not exactly standard fare for psychiatrists and psychologists.

But increasingly it should be, says Dean Abby, director of continuing education at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, who helped organize the course. In an interview with Environmental Working Group, he noted that science has advanced in ways that now make it possible to study the often-subtle effects of chemical and other exposures on our bodies and on children’s vulnerable bodies. It’s important to make connections between those exposures and the behavioral and emotional problems that get treated by mental health professionals, he says:

It’s the same thrust that has come in the last 25 years in developing a scientific understanding of the mind-body connection. It just made sense to try to push the envelope a little bit, since developmental issues concern us. We train school psychologists particularly, who work in an environment where they see all kinds of developmental threats and problems whose source is hard to pin down.

The course is co-sponsored by the Boston Institute for the Development of Infants and Parents (BIDIP) and the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society. It is open to the public for a fee about half of what professionals, who can earn credit toward continuing education requirements, must pay. Among those who have registered in advance are parents and day care professionals. Said Abby:

Anybody today who’s not looking at this stuff with a bigger and broader perspective is missing something critically important. It’s designed to force people who have concerns about these questions to codify their thinking.

The invited speakers are pediatrician Philip Landrigan, M.D. of New York’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine; toxicologist Bernard Weiss, Ph.D. of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry; neurologist David Bellinger of Boston’s Children’s Hospital; Megan Sandel, M.D. National Medical Director of the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership in Boston; and Barbara Brenner, executive director of San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Action.

EWG, a leader in documenting the effects of toxics such as bisphenol-A — and in the fight to reform the federal government’s regulation of chemicals — wishes it could be there.

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.”

Patagonia is the gold standard for environmentally responsible business. And at the company’s insistence, it’s recycled gold.

The Ventura, CA firm and icon of all that is natural, outdoorsy and sustainable, has dumped its co-branding program with SIGG over the bottle maker’s blatant conning of eco-conscious consumers regarding BPA.

Rick Ridgeway, Patagonia’s VP of environmental initiatives, is quoted as saying:

We did our homework on the topic of BPA, going all the way back to 2005 when this subject first emerged in discussions in scientific journals. We even arranged for one of the leading scientists on BPA research to come to our company to educate us on the issue. Once we concluded there was basis for concern, we immediately pulled all drinking bottles that contained BPA from our shelves and then searched for a BPA-free bottle. We very clearly asked SIGG if there was BPA in their bottles and their liners, and they clearly said there was not….

First CEO Steve Wasik admitted to having done a bad job spinning SIGG’s deceptive pitch about BPA–suggesting that it wasn’t in the lining of the pricey bottles.

That double-spin cycle set off weasel-ometers all over the Internet and began blipping through into mainstream media,

Mr. Wasik telephoned me on Sept. 3 to discuss EWG’s criticism of his tactics. Nothing he said changed our view. We called on Mr. Wasik and the company’s owners, a private equity firm known as The Riverside Company, to make a public apology and offer customers a full refund, not just an exchange.

We also urged the company to disclose fully the components of its new bottle liner, which it calls “EcoCare.”

Yesterday, Steve Wasik finally issued an apology for the deed itself. Which is where he should have started.

But he’s new to greenie-ness, he explains. Truthiness? He’s a master.

Along with Wasik’s latest apology comes the company’s latest bottle return policy. Now BPA-swigging SIGG owners are offered a demi-hassle: instead of having to mail their bottles back to SIGG (are you mad because you did that, too?), the misled masses can return them to retailers.

But they still end up with a SIGG bottle. The new ones that are “safe”.

You know, the new ones Patagonia refuses to sell.

Cameron Diaz, Scarlett Johansson, Zac Effron , Lucy Liu, Tobey Maguire, Cindy Crawford, Heidi Klum, Jessica Alba – and more.

How long will the company hang onto its VIP endorsers, especially glamorous moms like Julia Roberts, Jennifer Garner, Cindy Crawford and Heidi Klum and the pregnant Gisele Bundchen, now that CEO Steve Wasik has disclosed its bottles were lined, until recently, with bisphenol A (BPA), a toxic plastic component?

SIGG slogans like “Eco Logical” and “Friends don’t let friends drink from plastic” are ringing hollow in the wake of Wasik’s belated admission that the company coated its bottles’ insides with BPA-based epoxy resin until August 2008 — which means that for months afterward, health-conscious consumers plucked SIGG bottles off store racks, thinking they were BPA-free. But they weren’t.

That’s why my colleague Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, yesterday wrote SIGG’s owners, The Riverside Company, asking for a full apology and refunds to dissatisfied customers.

SIGG promotes its pricey bottles as high-end fashion accessories — “like your cellphone or your iPod,” Wasik told USA Today back in 2007 — and also a better alternative to Nalgene and Camelbak plastic bottles known to contain BPA, a synthetic estrogen found to disrupt the endocrine system. Both companies switched to non-BPA plastics in mid-2008, but SIGG enjoyed a spike in sales as consumers fled plastic. So did Kleen Kanteen and other companies that make stainless steel bottles that doesn’t require a coating.

Wasik’s letter to customers posted on the SIGG USA website around August 20 has stirred up a firestorm of controversy about the company’s marketing tactics. The Associated Press reported today that “Indignant Sigg owners …have been blogging and tweeting up a tsunami…The [Wasik] letter landed with a clang. Damning articles posted on the Web were repeatedly re-tweeted, showing the danger of stirring up consumer discontent in the age of social networks.”

Advertising Age, the bible of the marketing industry, reported Sept. 1 that “Sigg USA, maker of the metal, reusable bottles that became a badge of consumer eco-consciousness and all-around cool, is in danger of becoming a poster child for brand deception and corporate dishonesty.”

How long will all those eco-active stars stay in SIGG’s stable?

Savvy celebrities know that to burnish their images, the cause they embrace has to be true green, not green-washed. Celeb-watchers have noses like fruit bats when it comes to sniffing out faux-anything.

Wasik’s announcement has caused an uproar because the company led consumers and retailers to believe that its products were free of BPA. In doing so, SIGG capitalized and profited on consumers’ clear preference in recent years to avoid products made with the chemical.

Nothing Mr. Wasik said changed our view about SIGG’s discredited efforts to mislead consumers and retailers about its products.

We sent this letter today to the co-CEOs of The Riverside Company, the private equity firm that owns SIGG, asking for a public apology and a refund offer.

The Environmental Working Group
1436 U St NW
Washington, DC 20009

Stewart Kohl
Co-Chief Executive Officer
The Riverside Company
Terminal Tower
50 Public Square
29th Floor
Cleveland, Ohio 44113

September 4, 2009

Dear Mr. Kohl:

On behalf of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), I write to ask that you issue an unambiguous apology for misleading consumers and retailers about whether SIGG bottles contain the toxic chemical bisphenol-A (BPA).

I further urge you to modify SIGG Switzerland CEO Steve Wasik’s recent announcement of a SIGG voluntary bottle exchange program. Consumers should be able to take SIGG bottles that contain BPA to an authorized SIGG retailer and receive a refund for the full retail value of the product. The cost of the refund should be covered by SIGG.

The announced exchange policy, which forces customers to accept a replacement SIGG bottle, puts them in the untenable position of having to trust Mr. Wasik and his team about the composition and safety of the replacement product.

It is our view that SIGG’s reputation will be difficult to restore while Mr. Wasik remains at the helm of the company.

Sincerely,

Kenneth A. Cook
President
Environmental Working Group

CC:
Béla Szigethy
Co-Chief Executive Officer
The Riverside Company
45 Rockefeller Center
630 Fifth Avenue
Suite 2400
New York, NY 10111

Steve Wasik
Chief Executive Officer
SIGG Switzerland AG
Walzmühlestrasse 62
CH-8501 Frauenfeld
Switzerland

“The primary reason that I am writing this letter today is because I believe that the BPA conversation has changed dramatically in the last 12 months,” Wasik said in a “bulletin” posted on the SIGG website. “Last year, the primary concern was that of BPA leaching from bottles. Since that time the dialogue has evolved such that now some people are concerned about the mere presence of BPA and some states are considering legislation.”

Which sounds a lot like – Oh, that BPA.

Wasik’s disclosure marks a stunning about-face. Back in March 2007, as other bottle makers were struggling to cope with the burgeoning furor over their use of plastics based on BPA, a synthetic sex hormone, Wasik posted a statement on the company website asserting, “We understand the controversy and concern surrounding BPA leaching from plastic water bottles and can assure you that SIGG bottles are leach-free and 100% safe.”

It’s hard to see Wasik’s posture as anything but cynical. To be fair, he didn’t say point blank that SIGG bottles contained no BPA. He said they didn’t leach BPA. He decided, on his own authority, that consumers didn’t want or need to know more.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

And if others failed to parse his artfully worded statements, he didn’t bother to correct them. His March 2007 reassurance to customers quoted an email from a consumer advocacy group that said, in part, “SIGG bottles do not contain BPAs.”

Around the same time, a SIGG public relations representative engaged in a heated dialogue with Environmental Working Group over the nature of SIGG’s liner wrote in an email that the company was seeking to “assure dealers, press and consumers that come to us asking questions that there is no BpA in SIGG products.”

Maybe the PR man didn’t know the facts. But Steve Wasik did. And he didn’t set the record straight.

The mistaken perception that SIGG bottles were BPA-free very likely boosted the company’s position in the growing reusable bottle market. Wasik, profiled by Fortune/Small Business Magazine as a “marketing whiz,” joined the Swiss company in 2005 and promptly launched a high-profile advertising campaign touting the company’s commitment to the environment and featuring eco-stars Cameron Diaz and Julia Roberts. Wasik’s strategy paid off: in November 2007, Advertising Age reported that SIGG sales had spiked 250 percent between 2006 and 2007 and that U.S. outlets selling SIGG wares had multiplied from 400 to more than 1,300.

Not surprisingly, many consumers who bought SIGG bottles because they thought they could avoid dosing themselves and their families with BPA, which scientists have shown to disrupt the endocrine system and trigger a range of serious conditions, are now expressing outrage.

What’s the difference between drinking from a metal bottle with a plastic liner and a plastic bottle?

As far as we’re concerned – none.

To add insult to injury, in last week’s bulletin, Wasik informed consumers that he foresaw the BPA firestorm as early as mid-2006 and set out to develop a non-BPA alternative:

We recognized early that there were questions surrounding BPA and we wanted to be sure that we had a bottle liner that you, our customers, could have absolute confidence in. After two years of comprehensive testing and development and a one million dollar investment in new equipment for our Swiss factory, SIGG began producing bottles with our new, next generation “EcoCare” liner in August 2008.

“EcoCare,” he went on to say, is a “special powder-based co-polyester liner certified to be 100% BPA and Phthalate Free.”

Notice that he didn’t say what’s actually in EcoCare. That remains a mystery, just as the nature of SIGG’s pre-August 2008 lining was suspected but unconfirmed — until last week.

SIGG vs EWG

SIGG’s campaign to disassociate itself from BPA involved EWG. Back in March 2007, Wasik and his aides challenged an EWG report that said that “many metal water bottles, such as those sold by the brand SIGG, are lined with a plastic coating that contains BPA.”

As it turned out, EWG’s information was right on the money. But within a day after EWG’s report went online, SIGG threatened to sue EWG for “damaging its brand reputation.”

Wasik demanded a letter that EWG had “no knowledge or information that SIGG bottles pose any kind of health risk.” The company refused to provide data to support this statement, so we politely declined.

However, since we had decided not to name the brands of canned food we had tested for BPA contamination, we removed SIGG’s brand name from our consumer guide on how to avoid BPA exposure.

Wasik posted his own statement on the SIGG website attacking EWG’s report. He added:

SIGG bottles are in fact lined with a proprietary non-toxic, water-based resin which has been refined over decades of study and is extremely safe & stable…. SIGG bottles have been thoroughly tested in Europe to ensure 0% leaching of any substance – no trace of BPA, BPB or any phthalates…We are upset about the misinformation which has circulated and are working feverishly to clear the good name of SIGG.

Wasik even disputed EWG’s description of SIGG’s bottle liner as “plastic.” It’s hard to understand why. Plastic is a generic term that encompasses a wide variety of flexible man-made materials. The “Facts on Plastic” website of the American Chemistry Council, the Washington-based lobby for the chemical and plastics industries, goes into great detail about epoxy resin, popularized during the Eisenhower era. In the same vein, the Society of the Plastics Industry website lists “epoxy” among a number of “plastic resins” whose makers and users are represented by the trade association.

Wasik’s blustery description of the unnamed “resin” in SIGG bottles now seems a disingenuous distraction. As his recent bulletin, also carefully crafted, makes plain, the stuff was nothing more nor less than epoxy resin, whose “key building block,” according to the American Chemistry Council, is BPA.

For many consumers, the question has transcended the issue of BPA.

It’s, can you trust this company?

And what about all those people who took Wasik’s reassurances at face value and bought SIGG bottles manufactured before August 2008? They deserve full refunds or replacement bottles. And they shouldn’t be stuck paying for shipping. Baby bottle manufacturers and companies like Nalgene have offered their consumers this service. Replacing those discredited bottles is the bare minimum the company can do as it strives to rebuild its tarnished brand.

Tell Steve Wasik what’s on your mind. The SIGG website says his email is Steve.Wasik.CEO@sigg.com. While you’re at it, ask him what’s in EcoCare. Let him know you’re interested in what it is, not just whether it leached in tests in Europe. Or whether, in his opinion, it’s “special.”

And, if you like, tell him it’s all about talking straight to people, not talking down.

UPDATE: Want to communicate directly with SIGG? You can comment on the company’s Facebook page.

Or, if you’re on Twitter, Steve Wasik is @SIGGCEO.

Photo: SIGG Switzerland

That locked-in-place feeling gripped us during last week’s briefing on the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s progress – or lack of same — in reconsidering bisphenol A (BPA), the synthetic sex hormone found to leach into food and drink from plastic packaging. Back in June, the new FDA had promised a resolution of the question in “weeks, not months.”

Last week, though, FDA officials said the new review would not be done until late November. Moreover, they made it clear that the review was being led by one of the same officials who had developed the earlier, controversial FDA position that BPA food contamination is harmless to people.

We at Environmental Working Group don’t like to let the sun set on backpedaling, so immediately after the FDA staff briefing, Richard Wiles, EWG senior vice president for policy, sent a letter to FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg, asserting that “the course on which the agency seems to have embarked will do nothing to restore public confidence in FDA.”

Specifically, Wiles asked Hamburg to remove a key FDA official from the BPA reassessment — Mitchell Cheeseman, who, as deputy director of the Office of Food Additive Safety, was a principle architect of the agency’s Bush era position that BPA food contamination presents no danger to the public, even infants.

Cheeseman’s name had surfaced back in September 2007, when he told Chemical and Engineering News, “FDA absolutely still considers BPA safe for uses in food containers.”

At the time, Cheeseman was dismissing a statement by the so-called Chapel Hill group, a panel of BPA experts convened by the National Institute of Environmental Health, who had asserted that BPA at levels to which people were exposed caused laboratory animals to develop, among other things, cancer, reproductive system abnormalities, brain and neurological disorders and diabetes.

The FDA stuck to its guns throughout 2008, even as more and more research labs produced evidence of the chemical’s hazards, leading Canada to ban BPA in baby bottles. Some U.S. states and municipalities enacted partial BPA bans in the early months of 2009.

Meanwhile, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel added texture to the saga by publishing internal FDA emails showing that Cheeseman had consulted with chemical industry lobbyists on the agency’s position but had excluded dissenting voices. At one point, the Journal Sentinel reported, Cheeseman asked an American Chemistry Council (ACC) official how to discredit a Japanese study of BPA toxicity.

Last October, the Science Board pronounced the FDA staff’s work on BPA “incomplete and unreliable.”

Harsh words. Last week, FDA officials indicated to the Science Board that they wanted to set up a fresh new BPA panel in place of the more experienced subcommittee responsible for that stinging indictment.

As far as we’re concerned, green isn’t always a good thing. So Wiles asked Hamburg to keep the battled-hardened panel to oversee the FDA staff’s work.

Bill Murray’s character extricated himself from the Groundhog Day infinity loop when he abandoned his self-absorbed malaise, devoted himself to the public good — and got the girl.

EWG’s message to FDA was similar, except for the girl part. Don’t just sit there. Do something. As Wiles put it, to salvage its reputation, FDA has to show that it “puts the health of the public before the interests of BPA manufacturers and users.”

Yale researchers may have solved a fundamental medical mystery: how bisphenol A (BPA), a ubiquitous plastics component, changes genetic chemistry and impairs fertility.

The Yale team’s findings, previewed earlier this month to the Endocrine Society, a 14,000-member scientific and medical professional organization devoted to hormone system research and treatment, have intensified scientists’ concern that exposure BPA, a synthetic estrogen that disrupts the endocrine system, may have grave consequences for human reproduction.

In an interview with Environmental Working Group, study co-author Hugh S. Taylor, M.D., professor and chief of the reproductive endocrinology section at Yale University School of Medicine, said his team injected pregnant mice with BPA for just one week. After those mice, and a control group, gave birth, the scientists found that the genetic chemistry of female offspring exposed to BPA in the womb had been irrevocably altered.

A particular gene known as HOXA10, responsible for normal uterine development and fertility in both mice and humans, had been stripped of numerous so-called “methyl groups,” each composed of a single hydrogen atom and three carbon atoms.

“We’ve discovered the exact mechanism by which BPA affects this gene,” Taylor said. “This small group can have a powerful effect in turning genes on and off.”

BPA scrambles mouse fertility gene’s on-off switch

The HOXA10 gene’s loss of methyl groups, Taylor and his colleagues determined, caused the uterine lining to become “hyper-responsive” to estrogen – and “out of sync” with the needs of a fertilized egg. A female mouse exposed to BPA in utero could conceive normally but her ability to carry a pregnancy to term might be compromised.

The chemical industry insists that neither the Yale study nor any other amounts to proof positive that BPA causes human infertility or other serious health conditions associated with the chemical in animal experiments.

The Yale scientists don’t claim to have settled the many questions about BPA’s impact on human health. They administered a higher BPA dosage to the lab mice than the general human exposure level. Their study, a work in progress, has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal and corroborated by other researchers. They are planning more research on exactly how much, or little, BPA it takes to jumble a test animal’s genetic chemistry.

“Permanent and irreversible” fertility loss

But their findings, which are concrete and specific, have already attracted considerable attention among a growing number of scientists studying BPA’s complex interactions with living things.

“It’s troubling that the changes are permanent and irreversible,” Taylor said of the mouse infertility findings. “I don’t want to say that at typical human exposure, there’s clear and present danger, but there’s enough concern that there might be to warrant further investigation.”

BPA linked to heart irregularities

Two other research studies presented at the annual Endocrine Society meeting raised new questions about BPA and health:

• A University of Cincinnati team led by scientist Scott Belcher, Ph.D., linked BPA exposure to arrhythmias– irregular heartbeats — in female (but not male) rats and mice.

• Pioneer BPA researcher Frederick Vom Saal, Ph.D., of the University of Missouri-Columbia outlined a new estimate that Americans’ exposure to BPA is probably significantly higher than the U.S. government’s maximum “safe” dosage.

Hormone experts press for new restrictions on BPA, other chemicals

These and other recent reports caused the Endocrine Society, the world’s oldest and largest professional organization devoted to research and clinical practice on hormones and endocrinology, to take the unusual step of issuing its first “scientific statement” declaring that BPA and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals in food, water and consumer products represent a “significant concern to public health.” The society vowed to press for new government regulations to “decrease human exposure to the many
endocrine-disrupting agents.”

Andrea Gore, Ph.D., a University of Texas pharmacology professor who helped spearhead the society’s unprecedented move into public policy, said the weight of evidence is now substantial that chemicals that mimic or disturb hormone activity are corroding public health in many ways, from decreasing fertility to increasing incidence of some cancers. The scientific statement stressed that during critical developmental periods in early life, exposures to even very low levels of endocrine disruptors could have consequences decades later.

Developing children face most severe chemical threat

“If something disrupts the endocrine system of a fetus or infant,” said Gore, “you may not know there’s a problem until the exposed individual suddenly discovers she’s infertile. That may not be until 20 to 40 years later.”

Some cancer, she said, may be a delayed reaction to early exposures to environmental chemicals. “We believe the predisposition to certain kinds of cancers such as breast, prostate, uterine, testicular and other hormonally-sensitive cancers, is set very early in life,” she said. “Our likelihood of developing disease depends upon complex interactions between our genes and our environment – and changing the hormonal environment early
in life through exposure to endocrine disruptors can predispose us to an increased risk of developing these diseases in adulthood or with aging.”

Scientist: Chemicals should be considered dangerous until proven safe

“Although much recent attention has focused on BPA, I don’t think we can stop there,” said Gore, who is researching the endocrine-disrupting properties of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), industrial chemicals banned in 1977 but still detectable in most people and wildlife. “We need to learn from BPA, PCBs and other endocrine disruptors such as pesticides, fungicides, plastics and plasticizers that we cannot assume that a product
is safe until it is proven otherwise.”

Among the Endocrine Society’s recommendations: reverse current U.S. policy and treat that chemical compounds as potentially hazardous until shown to be safe. “This is a complete philosophical shift,” said Gore, “and one that will require cooperation among individual researchers, clinicians, scientific societies and policy makers.”

But as scientists implicate BPA in a lengthening roster of ailments — among them, cancer, reproductive and cardiovascular system disorders, brain and neurological system dysfunctions, behavioral problems, diabetes and obesity — they are galvanizing political and regulatory efforts to rein in environmental pollutants whose mysteries are only beginning to be unraveled.

Do you find this new scientific development compelling? If so, let us know here on the blog and share this news with other engaged in the issue.

I’m also writing on the HuffingtonPost, and you can read my other articles there.

“Is this the kind of ‘marketing’ effort that Coca-Cola stands behind when it comes to toxic chemicals that contaminate the food supply?”  Cook asked.

Seemed like a simple question at the time.  So what’s Coca-Cola’s answer?

None, so far.   EWG hasn’t received a response.  Nor has Coca-Cola chairman and chief executive officer Muhtar Kent commented to reporters.

However, if you dig deep into the “citizenship” pages of the Coca-Cola corporate website, you’ll find an adamant defense of BPA, a component of epoxy resin used to line food and beverage cans and also a synthetic estrogen that disrupts the endocrine system:

BPA is used to make the linings of two- and three-piece cans to prevent spoilage and protect foods and beverages from direct contact with the can. However, both polycarbonate plastics and the epoxy resins used in food and beverage containers continue to be authorized by the FDA, the European Food Safety Authority, and the Japanese and German governments as safe for use in contact with foods or beverages.

While BPA is used in the production process for making the lining of some aluminum cans, finished sparkling beverage cans have not been found to contain any BPA when tested by the FDA. Additionally, independent studies in New Zealand and the United Kingdom have not detected BPA in sparkling beverages. The beverage packaging produced by Coca-Cola does not pose a public health risk– including any alleged risks associated with BPA.

Coca-Cola has selected its facts carefully. Let’s take a look at a few more facts:

• The federal Food and Drug Administration is reconsidering its position, adopted under the Bush White House, that BPA contamination of food and beverages does not pose health risks to people, even children. In early June, Margaret Hamburg, the new head of the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA), assigned the agency’s chief scientist to take a “fresh look” at the BPA issue, to be completed, according to her spokesman, in “weeks not months.”
• Major Japanese food processors voluntarily adopted low or non-BPA canned food linings as early as 1998, without waiting for legislation, because of consumer alarm over scientific findings that many young Japanese had elevated BPA blood levels, attributed to leaching from cans of hot tea and coffee served by   vending machines.
• The U.S. government’s National Toxicology Program and dozens of independent   scientists in the U.S. and abroad have expressed concern about the effects of BPA on human brain and reproductive system development and behavior.
• Last week, the Endocrine Society, numbering 14,000 researchers and medical experts in 100 countries, issued an unprecedented “scientific statement,” warning that BPA and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) “have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology.”
• Last March researchers with the Canadian government agency Health Canada found BPA in 85 percent of  72 soft drinks sold in Canadian stores. All  Coca-Cola products tested positive for BPA, among them Coca-Cola, .18 μg/L (micrograms per liter); Diet Coke, .35 μg/L; grapefruit-flavored Fresca,  1.1 μg/L; cherry-citrus Fresca, .75 μg/L Tab, .18 μg/L; Sprite, .17 μg/L, and Full Throttle energy drink, .60 μg/L.

The Canadian tests showed contamination levels in Coca-Cola products to be extremely low, a small fraction of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) “safe” level of 50 μg/L.  (Canada’s “safe” level is 25 μg/L.)

But they’re not zero.

Whether any exposure to BPA and other endocrine disruptors can be called safe is a matter of heated debate as more research reports implicate endocrine-disrupting chemicals in a host of serious health problems.  Dozens of highly regarded government and academic researchers contend that EPA’s level has been overtaken by events and should be revised or junked.

Industry officials disagree.  For instance, the North American Metal Packaging Alliance says that BPA-laden epoxy can lining “serves a critical function by preventing a myriad of contaminants from penetrating into the food, affording longer shelf life and significant nutrition, convenience, and economy.”   NAMPA, by the way, was identified in the leaked industry document as a key organizer of the strategy session at Washington’s elite Cosmos Club, at which lobbyists from Coca-Cola, DelMonte, Crown, Alcoa and the chemical and food processing industries discussed hiring a “pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA.”

Contrast the industry’s cynical tone with the Endocrine Society’s sober assessment 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.”

So why hasn’t Coca-Cola responded more fulsomely to questions about its marketing and lobbying tactics?  We have no idea.  We can only speculate that the company may be following those unwritten rules of public life:

• If you’re in a hole, stop digging.
• If your explanation won’t fit on a bumper sticker, it won’t fly.
• If you’re in a tight spot, keep quiet until somebody changes the subject.

Good luck with that.  But this subject – industrial toxins in food, water and consumer products – isn’t going away.