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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.
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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
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.
At least RTF summary before you accuse people of mass hysteria. It says that aluminum beverage can liners contain BPA.
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.
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The bottle itself is a polymer of Bisphenol-A sub-units. As the bottle itself naturally breaks down from exposure to light, heat, etc. the polymer sub-units are liberated into the free BPA that is a problem. As long as there's a bottle made of polycarbonate, the water stored in it will have BPA.
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'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.
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