Trust the French. They do seem to have a penchant for doing their own thing or being different for the sake of being different. That probably is a quality the chemical industry can exploit.
In an update to its position on bisphenol A (BPA) last week, the French Food Safety Agency (AFSSA) said it did not accept the conclusions of dozens of studies carried out on animals that had found a link between exposure to BPA and a raft of serious health problems. After all, what would the rest of the world know?
Not surprisingly, a European plastics industry body has hailed the decision by the AFSSA to use “scientific” considerations to guide its ongoing evaluation of bisphenol A (BPA). Does this mean the European chemical industry has secured some “good scientists” who can be trusted to make “the right” findings in their “research”? Good question. Quite possibly, since that is how such marketing challenges are usually dealt with.
Interestingly, while AFSSA did not recommend any regulatory changes to restrict the use of BPA, it listed a number of measures that consumers should take to minimise their exposure to BPA, after highlighting there were indeed actually “warning signs” over the chemical. It also called for the rapid development of a methodology to detect potential toxicity in humans of very low doses of BPA and for more research to be carried out into replacement products and endocrine disruptors in general. It sounds like the French agency is not overwhelmingly confident that everyone else is wrong and that “their scientists” can find what the industry wants.
Read more in our earlier articles.
Bisphenol-A Dose-related Increase in Sexual Dysfunction Risk in Humans
Study Finds BPA Associated With Heart Disease
It is time to avoid exposure to bisphenol A.
Tags: bisphenol A, BPA
California is virtually going the opposite way. Instead of rejecting all of the scientific studies and claiming more studies are needed before acting BPA could be listed as a toxin by the Californian Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA).
The OEHHA is considering the listing following a request from the Natural Resources Defense Council. In a letter to the OEHHA, the organization’s senior scientist Gina Solomon said: “We write on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council – an environmental and public health organization which as 1.2m members…250,000 of whom are Californians – to ask OEHHA to move forward immediately to list bisphenol A under Proposition 65 as a chemical that is known to the state to cause reproductive toxicity.”
Its petition was based on a 2008 National Toxicology Program report which concluded that there is widespread exposure to BPA and that this may affect human development or reproduction.
Under state law, so-called Proposition 65 requires the governor to publish a list of chemicals known to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity.