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FDA on BPA
The FDA released its long-awaited reassessment of the safety of BPA last Friday.

“They pulled the oldest trick in the book,” says ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan. “If you want to minimize publicity for a statement, you release it on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend.”

“Another trick is to pledge more money to 'ongoing studies,'” says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross. “The FDA decided to tout its reaction to activist...

ACSH staffers welcome an article in the online journal, Medscape, reporting on the Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) suit against the FDA asking for a “writ of mandamus,” or court order requiring the agency to respond to NRDC’s 2008 petition to ban the use of BPA in commercial products.

In addition to calling the NRDC lawsuit “bizarre,” ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross was further quoted in the article:

Every scientific body that has evaluated BPA has ruled that it is safe in the amounts that most people are exposed to in our environment. There’s no scientific basis for this crusade against BPA, and the lawsuit against the FDA is simply a way to get attention for the NRDC.

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As we have often noted, independent and government-sponsored studies worldwide have repeatedly found that normal exposure to the plastic hardener bisphenol-A (BPA) poses no risk to human health. Further supporting this is a new clinical study out of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine that found no correlation between BPA levels in urine and type 2 diabetes. The study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine this month, involved over 3,400 residents of Shanghai.

ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross was pleased to hear that the findings of this clinical study support what other research has...

Angela Logomasini of the Competitive Enterprise Institute defends BPA in the Washington Examiner in light of this week’s possible Senate vote on an amendment to the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act that would ban the chemical in food packaging.

“As she writes in her op-ed, BPA has many important applications for consumer products,” says Dr. Ross. “All valid scientific evidence and all government regulatory bodies that have evaluated this evidence have come to the same conclusion: BPA is safe. Any argument to the contrary is a politically motivated attack on a safe consumer product...

The precautionary principle has given birth to fears that infants delivered via Cesarean section or with the aid of forceps are at risk of phthalate and bisphenol A (BPA) contamination. At least those are the findings of a something like a study published Tuesday in France s Health Watch Institute publication, Weekly Epidemiological Bulletin (Bulletin Epidemiologic Hebdomadaire). The study authors screened about 280 urine samples and observed 500 births, then concluded that the bisphenol A (BPA) from urine bags and the phthalates from medical equipment are present in higher concentrations in women who do not give birth...

CowabungaWe need another BPA study like we need root canal. For many years, hundreds (thousands?) of them have been published just about everywhere except on bus shelters, desperately hoping to find something wrong with the chemical, which is used to make a variety of plastic products, such as can liners. The studies are are mostly terrible.

But that hasn't stopped a Danish group from publishing a laughably-flawed paper on the chemical's effect on how fast rats swim, and similarly critical information.

The only thing "special" about this...

In the mood for some hilarity? I am.

A new press release from the Silent Spring Institute (SSI) makes me wonder whether they've jumped the gun on April Fool's Day. Don't believe me?

"Consumers who avoid products with harmful chemicals on the label have lower body burden."

I'll go into the "details" later but let's cut to the summary: People who avoid certain chemicals have less of those chemicals in their bodies. Duh?

Isn't that a bit like saying:

"People who swing an ax at their forehead are more likely to have an ax embedded in their foreheads than people who do not swing an ax at their forehead."

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We d like to give a shout-out to Julia Seymour of the Business & Media Institute of the Virginia-based Media Research Center. Seymour recently conducted a content analysis of mainstream media (The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, and NBC news reports, among many others), identifying the scare tactics they've used to exacerbate the phobia so many people have of food-packaging chemicals specifically in her analysis, bisphenol A (BPA).

Seymour found that an outstanding majority (99 percent, over the two years she studied, 2010-2011) of media stories focused on the threat of BPA. Conversely, only two of the 87 stories discussed the research...

This piece first appeared in the New York Post.

Chemical-phobia is in full bloom this spring. Terrifying headlines on cancer risks, infertility, impaired sexual development and more have plastic bottles and rubber duckies being pulled off store shelves.

But the risks aren't real - the scary "news" is an artifact of a research method that falsely reports dangers in chemicals that don't harm our health. Applied across the board, it would lead to bans on about half the chemicals in the world -- including the...

OEHHA Questions BPA
California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) is requesting information on BPA so that they can decide if it should be added to the state’s Prop 65 list of toxic substances.

“BPA was already considered for the Prop 65 list by an expert panel from California’s Development and Reproductive Toxicant Identification Committee, and they determined that there was not enough evidence to list it,” says ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross. “...