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Plastic Chemical BPA Declared Toxic In Canada

Posted by Soulskill on from the good-thing-it's-not-toxic-here dept.

Julie188 writes "The Canadian government has formally declared bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical widely used to create clear, hard plastics, as well as food can liners, to be a toxic substance. Does this mean that you'll be tackled by the Canadian Mounties if you stroll around with some bottled water? Not exactly. Being a toxic chemical doesn't mean you can't get a little love. The government will at first try and set limits on how much BPA can be released into the air or water by factories that use the compound."

2 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Re:But asbestos is fine! by tomhudson · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Synergy - the asbestos makes it harder for the lungs to cough up the fine tobacco particles, and those particles contain traces of actinides from a-bomb tests that will continue to filter down to the ground from the stratosphere to be absorbed by broad-leafed tobacco plants for another hundred years.

    100 years ago, lung cancer was so rare that doctors would tell their students to take a good look, because they'd probably never see another case in their lifetime. People were smoking back then, but we didn't have both bomb residues and high levels of asbestos dust (asbestos brake shoes meant that pretty much everyone has bee exposed).

  2. Re:But asbestos is fine! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actinides (other than uranium and plutonium) are rare in bomb fallout. You are probably thinking of polonium.

    Anyway, if biological fallout uptake were the principal driver for the relationship between smoking and lung cancer, then the dose-response relationship -- first measured in the 1950s -- should have changed by roughly a factor of two during the course of the 1960s.

    One would expect both incidence and mortality of lung cancer to be rarer in Europe and the US prior the 1930s because mortality from other causes was higher. Furthermore, cigarette smoking became much more popular in the early 1900s, perhaps corresponding with the rise of the cinema. It's not that people didn't smoke tobacco before then... but they were almost always pipe-smokers.