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BPA Leaches From Polycarbonate Bottles Into Humans
Linus the Turbonerd sends in the bulletin that BPA, a toxic chemical used in the production of polycarbonate, the plastic composing hard, clear water bottles, has been found to leach out of such containers, directly into the water that their users consume. "In addition to polycarbonate bottles, which are refillable and a popular container among students, campers and others and are also used as baby bottles, BPA is also found in dentistry composites and sealants and in the lining of aluminum food and beverage cans. ... 'We found that drinking cold liquids from polycarbonate bottles for just one week increased urinary BPA levels by more than two-thirds. If you heat those bottles, as is the case with baby bottles, we would expect the levels to be considerably higher. This would be of concern since infants may be particularly susceptible to BPA's endocrine-disrupting potential,' said Karin B. Michels, associate professor of epidemiology at HSPH and Harvard Medical School and senior author of the study."
Isn't this extremely old news? Companies have been making BPA-free plastic bottles now for a long long time, including baby bottles.
"In case of emergency, break glass. Scream. Bleed to death."
This could grow tits on a frog.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
This is one of many reasons I take my soda in the form of glass bottles. Vivà IBC!
Well, either that or the enriched uranium canisters that mountain dew comes in.
These bottles were banned two years ago, though not in the USA. This is hardly a bulletin.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Nalgene, one of, if not the biggest producers of the 'indestructable' plastic bottles with BPA, still does not acknowledge the health detriments even though they stopped producing those bottles. Probably because of liability reasons... http://www.nalgene-outdoor.com/technical/bpaInfo.html
has genistein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genistein
genistein is a potent estrogen mimic
soy has been used in many cultures for thousands of years
where is the faux outrage about how soy is going to destroy the world?
not that i think we shouldn't get rid of BPA. get rid of BPA, please. the positives it enables are outweighed by the negatives. same with transfats, same with DDT: get rid of these substances form our food supply and our environment. just do it without the drama
but i don't see why this pantytwisted fear-addled panic is supposed to help anyone or anything
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I knew it, I knew it, glass bottled beer ftw.
BPA in plastic bottles was banned in Canada last year.
This is the justification of beast feeding that I've been waiting for. Now, if you don't mind, I'm off to find a tit.
Unitil I return, all the breast, to you and yours.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Can the US government finally get on the fucking ball and ban BPA? I'm sick of catering to business interests.
Great! I think we should all go back to lead plumbing and lead pewter cups.... After a couple of generations, we won't have all these fancy "scientific" reports.... Instead we will have... "wite paint tastyer than blu paint"
refinance cost
There was an interesting article on NPR recently where they looked at premature infants who were on heart-lung machines whose tubing all used such BPA. These kids had much higher levels than other kids in their systems. 15 years later there were no detectable problem with their reproductive systems. Granted the study size was small, but there is clearly no dramatic effect from significantly larger levels than adults get from using water bottles.
Companies have been ditching BPA on their own...government intervention is unnecessary. If you wanna whine about government catering to business interests, you're definitely barking up the wrong tree.
http://2008.igem.org/Team:University_of_Alberta This project was about creating a synthetic organism that would be able to detect and destroy this stuff
Not anywhere near quickly enough, considering that the vast majority of polycarbonates still contain BPA. As long as the cost saving of BPA exceeds the sales lost, companies won't move a bit. Parents with young children tend to be hyper-vigilant, so sure, companies will remove BPA from baby bottles. But people don't pay as much attention to other products.
first and foremost, you can suck it, FDA! suck it hard!
You knew this all along and you put us all in danger due to corporate influences.
We should now be able to see the FDA chief, who allowed BPA to continue in products, put in jail for gross negligence.
They're using their grammar skills there.
The linked report was less than useful, since the reporting was done in relative terms - e.g. "increased by two thirds". Okay, but two thirds over what? There are generally specific concentrations above which a chemical is identified as harmful by the government (or by a watchdog agency, if you don't trust the government). Why not say "BPA levels increase from the background level of xxxxxxx to a ppm/ppb of yyyyyy in individuals who drank from these bottles for one week"?
So really, even if the shift away from BPA plastics wasn't already well on, there's no indication from this report whether I should actually be concerned or not. And frankly, as someone with a science background, this sort of thing makes me LESS likely to be concerned. When I see fuzzy reporting, my first though is it was done intentionally because they can't support their case using objective numbers. I've seen this happen in honest-to-goodness scientific papers way too often to not notice.
#DeleteChrome
So what's the half-life of one of these bottles when full of water? Eventually, most of the BPA will be leached out, and the bottle will become safer. Does this take months, or years?
From Nalgene... I've bolded the part I found interesting.
Question: Why is Nalgene transitioning from polycarbonate to other materials?
Answer: [Blah, blah, blah] Our decision to phase out production of the Outdoor line of polycarbonate containers is in response to consumer demand for products that do not include Bisphenol-A (BPA).
We are confident that the bottles which contain BPA are safe for their intended use. However, because of consumer requests for alternative materials, we have decided to transition our polycarbonate product line to Eastman Tritanâ copolyester. This product joins our family of bottles and containers made of various non-BPA materials such as HDPE, PP, LDPE and PET.
[Blah, blah, blah]
Based on the findings of the Food and Drug Administration, The Environmental Protection Agency, The European Food Safety Authority, The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, The Japan Ministry of Health, Labor & Welfare, The American Plastics Council and other reliable sources from around the world, we continue to firmly believe in the safety of our products containing BPA. However, we intend to carefully monitor the results of the National Toxicology Report and the Canadian government's inquiry into this issue and any other relevant scientific information.
Now I'm not sure the Plastics Council is a group I'd want to get my info from, but the rest sound somewhat compelling. So what's the deal, yes it leaches, but it's not necessarily harmful? I wouldn't want to be a sucker for some company's BS, but what's the deal with groups above?
Most canned foods (soups, beans, etc.) have a BPA-laden liner too. There was one company whose name escapes me right now that used a safer natural* lining. It's for this reason I swore off any canned soup (even the so-called healthy ones) well over a year ago.
* If you like beans, beans and more beans, this was fine, but the company didn't make the chicken soup I wanted :-(
-- This
Most people here seem to think that the BPA in bottles and linings is harmful. I work in a lab that tests the low-dose exposure effects of BPA on mice. I personally drink from cans lined with BPA-laden plastics all the time, because the dose-response curves I've seen indicate that the risk of harm from BPA is negligible.
There are plenty of other estrogenic compounds that you all consume in much higher quantities, so if you care about your BPA intake, you are misinformed. I'd like to thank the science news cycle for that.
'We found that drinking cold liquids from polycarbonate bottles for just one week increased urinary BPA levels by more than two-thirds [from nearly zero to 1.6×nearly zero] . If you heat those bottles, as is the case with baby bottles, we would expect the levels to be considerably higher. This would be of concern since infants may be particularly susceptible to BPA's endocrine-disrupting potential,'
This is propaganda, not science.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
What kind of symptoms would someone experience or exhibit if poisoned by this?
8==8 Bones 8==8