BPA health scare gets more serious

I have given extensive coverage to the controversy over bisphenol-A (BPA), a common ingredient in plastics you use every day.

Today, the Journal of the American Medical Association put in front of its paid firewall a study that will ratchet those concerns even higher.

The conclusion:

Higher levels of BPA in your urine indicate an increased risk of heart attack, stroke, or diabetes.

This was accompanied by an editorial from Frederick vom Saal (above) of the University of Missouri recommending that the U.S. follow Canada, declaring BPA a "'toxic chemical' requiring aggressive action to limit human and environmental exposures."

One important point here is that we're not just talking about Nalgene bottles or baby bottles.

As Mr. Vom Saal notes, BPA is found in a wide range of products, including dental sealants, the insides of soda cans and the carbonless carbon paper used for credit card receipts.

JAMA notes that vom Saal helped coordinate a 2006 conference on BPA and defended BPA as an expert witness in 2004. He has written about BPA extensively (and you can download it all in Word). He is no enemy of the BPA industry.

His story includes this nugget:

Congressional action could follow the precedent set with the recent passage of federal legislation designed to limit exposures to another family of compounds, phthalates, also used in plastic. Like BPA, phthalates are detectable in virtually everyone in the United States. This bill moves US policy closer to the European model, in which industry must provide data on the safety of a chemical before it can be used in products.

Europe may be fighting words to some, but conditions like heart disease and diabetes are enormously expensive to fight. Diabetes care alone takes anywhere from one in eight to one in four of our health care dollars each year.

So is a European attitude now warranted?