If you've been paying the slightest bit of attention, you know that bisphenol A - a common chemical found in plastic water bottles and tin cans - is bad stuff. It leaches into food and water and gets into our bodies, and it poses a special risk to children. Just last month, a study from Simon Fraser University suggested that women exposed to higher levels of BPA in pregnancy are more likely to have daughters with aggressive and hyperactive behaviours.
Environmental activists have warned that BPA in plastic water bottles is associated with cancer, diabetes, man-boobs, reduced sperm counts, shrunken testicles, early onset puberty and obesity. One environmental group warned: "Just one to three servings of [canned]foods with these concentrations could expose a woman or child to BPA at levels that caused serious adverse effects in animal tests." And Consumer Reports has found alarmingly high levels of BPA in many name-brand canned foods.
These findings are regularly reported by the media. No wonder people are alarmed. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is one of them. "In my reporting around the world," he wrote Sunday, "I've come to terms with the threats from warlords, bandits and tarantulas. But endocrine disrupting chemicals - they give me the willies."
But Mr. Kristof and anxious North American consumers might be surprised to learn the rest of the developed world doesn't think BPA is a risk.
A mountain of evidence has been thoroughly evaluated by regulators, scientists and expert panels in Japan, Australia, the European Union, France, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway. None found any risk. The World Health Organization and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have weighed in, too. All have rejected the environmentalists' claims. France's Health Minister is typical. "Reliable studies have concluded that baby bottles containing bisphenol A are innocuous," she declared.
The relentless crusade against BPA is driven by a few North American environmental groups and a small number of scientists. They would like you to believe that their only opposition comes from industry. Wrong. A major new study from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency failed to find any evidence that BPA in low doses is a problem. How much media attention do you think it got? Zero. Serious science can't compete with mean girls and man-boobs.
"The media have been staggeringly resistant to the idea that BPA is safe," says Trevor Butterworth, a senior researcher at the Washington-based Statistical Assessment Service, a non-profit, non-partisan organization affiliated with George Mason University. His group recently asked more than 900 toxicologists for their views of the news media. The results aren't pretty. More than 90 per cent of them said the media can't tell good evidence from bad. More than 75 per cent said the media overstate chemical risk in their coverage.
Wait, hasn't Canada also concluded that BPA can be hazardous to humans? That's what Mr. Kristof says. But Canada has concluded no such thing. Under pressure from the media, the public and environmentalists, Health Canada banned plastic baby bottles. The move, though, was completely precautionary (meaning it's looking for more evidence that the plastic bottles are safe). Health Canada has also said BPA "does not pose a health risk" to either adults or infants. In July, after testing the levels of BPA in water bottles and baby food, it found them far too small to be of concern. "You'd have to drink a thousand litres of bottled water a day to approach Canada's provisional tolerable daily intake for BPA," says Mr. Butterworth.
So what about that study on aggressive girls? "Meaningless," says Mr. Butterworth. It's not scare stories about alleged endocrine disruptors that should give you the willies - it's activism disguised as science.