The Bisphenol-A Dilemma

How is government responding? It's not

Inside Bay Area, Douglas Fischer
Published April 21, 2007

Officially, Uncle Sam filters all decisions through the lens of improved children's health. But in practice, some federal decisions subvert that, critics note. Take bisphenol-a, a chemical developed as a synthetic estrogen in the 1930s. It never found much medical use, but industry chemists in the 1950s somehow discovered bisphenol-a's nifty ability to make plastic shatterproof. Today the compound is found in baby bottles, Nalgene drink bottles and other hard plastic products. It's also used to line tin food cans. Scientists lately have raised many troubling questions about the compounds' abilities to scramble chromosomes and impair reproductive health. Yet bisphenol-a has skirted President Clinton's 1997 executive order asking all federal agencies to focus on improving the well-being of children. "How is the government responding? It's not," said Joy Carlson of Oakland, who co-founded the Children's Environmental Health Network In the past few years, researchers studying laboratory animals have found bisphenol-a acts like a hormone at exquisitely low levels, scrambling chromosomes and impairing future reproductive health in the very young. In March, two environmental watchdogs published two reports noting that bisphenol-a leaches from bottles and food cans at levels near those causing harm in animals, putting many Americans, particularly children, at risk. Manufacturers use 6 billion pounds a year, yet the agency charged with setting exposure standards to date has found no problems with its use. That agency is an obscure arm of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences called the Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction. It is in the midst of assessing the chemical's health risks. Leaking out of canned food samples In March, the Environmental Working Group announced it had found bisphenol-a leaking out of half of nearly 100 samples of canned food tested. Bisphenol-a is often applied as a coating inside food cans to extend shelf life. But what caused the biggest stir in Congress was its report that the government's health assessment was being compiled by a contractor with ties to chemical companies manufacturing bisphenol-a. "The whole review panel is working with a 400-page document that was compiled by an independent contractor," said Sonya Lunder, a researcher with Environmental Working Group. "You have babies drinking formula who are getting half the dose of lab rats showing permanent reproductive defects. This is a sign we need to do something more serious immediately." In a statement, the National Institute of Environmental Health noted that the contractor, Sciences International Inc., was charged only with finding and sorting the hundreds of scientific papers published in recent years on bisphenol-a. It did not evaluate them or otherwise draw any conclusions about the science; that work will be done by government employees and scientists on the independent review panel. Sciences International, the agency said, had no "responsibilities that would directly influence the outcome of (agency) decisions" regarding the chemical. Nonetheless, the agency fired the company earlier this month, six weeks after the conflict first came to light. And other governments, most recently the European Union in November, have looked at the same data and found no reason for worry. "There's a huge amount of science," said Steve Hentges, executive director of the American Chemistry Council's polycarbonate bisphenol-a global group. "It's been reviewed by governments and agencies worldwide, and they've all come out with the same range of conclusions." The Environmental Working Group study of canned food