Anatomy of a Chemical Murder

Wal-Mart announced last week that it would stop selling baby bottles made
with the chemical bisphenol A, or BPA.

In the past, I would have laid the blame for this junk science-fueled shame
at the feet of anti-chemical environmental jihadists, their pseudo-scientist
henchmen at universities and government regulatory agencies and Wal-Mart’s
knuckleheaded executives, who seem to be more interested in appeasing
eco-pressure groups than reassuring consumers the products the retailer has sold
for decades are safe.

But the banning of baby bottles made with BPA is so mind-bogglingly baseless
that I just have to lay the blame where it truly belongs — with the lame-o
chemical industry, which utterly failed to defend its product against activist
claims and a regulatory process so specious it would cause voodoo practitioners
to shudder.

First, there is no evidence anyone has ever been harmed by BPA in a consumer
product, despite widespread use in baby and medical products and food and
beverage containers; moreover, there’s no reason to expect anyone ever would be
harmed, as exposures to BPA from consumer products are 100 times lower than the
"safe" level determined by government regulators.

If you think about it, products made with BPA are, in fact, safer than, say,
Wal-Mart’s peanut-containing products that can cause fatal allergic reactions in
children. Yet peanut products remain on the shelves.

So just how did BPA wind up becoming chemical non grata?

Early activist efforts against industrial chemicals in the environment (circa
1960-1990) largely were based on allegations that they were cancer-causing. But
by the early-1990s it became clear that this was not so, particularly at
exposure levels typically found in the environment.

The activists then switched to claims that small exposures to certain
chemicals — so-called "environmental estrogens" or "endocrine disrupters" —
interfered with normal hormonal processes to cause a variety of adverse health
effects ranging from attention deficit disorder to miscarriages to
sterility.

This scare hit the mainstream media in 1996 with the publication of the
alarmist book "Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence
and Survival? — A Scientific Detective Story."

The book and scare quickly faded, however, as many scientists and the
chemical industry responded strongly against the allegations, some of the
scare’s prominent proponents were found guilty of related scientific misconduct and a review panel of the National Academy of
Sciences determined in 1999 there was no evidence to support alarm about
so-called endocrine disrupters.

So endocrine disrupter theory advocates went back to the drawing board and
came up with a successful strategy: If their claims didn’t measure up to what
generally was considered as science, then they would change how science was
conducted.

As reported in this column seven
years ago
, the National Toxicology Program, or NTP — a federal agency whose
mission seems to be scaring the public about industrial chemicals and whose
staff is closely tied to the anti-chemical movement — did the activists’ dirty
work by tossing out the toxicology rulebook in establishing two precedents key
to the fate of BPA.

First, the NTP determined it no longer was necessary to show that the risk of
health effects from a chemical increased with greater exposure. "The dose makes
the poison" had been a fundamental principle of toxicology for hundreds of
years.

The NTP then also decided it no longer was necessary for scientists to submit
reproducible study results; traditionally, before the results of a scientific
experiment are accepted as valid, other scientists must be able to confirm the
results by replicating them independently.

These changes finally paid off last week as the NTP issued a preliminary
assessment of BPA driven by several non-reproducible experiments claiming to
indicate that BPA is associated with adverse health effects in mice at doses far
below the safe levels determined by traditional testing.

"The scientific evidence that supports a conclusion of some concern for
exposures in fetuses, infants and children comes from a number of laboratory
animal studies reporting that ‘low’ level exposure to bisphenol A during
development can cause changes in behavior and the brain, prostate gland, mammary
gland, and the age at which females attain puberty," the NTP concluded.

Although the NTP also acknowledged that "these studies only provide limited
evidence for adverse effects on development and more research is needed to
better understand their implications for human health," the NTP’s finding of
"some concern" was enough to prompt Wal-Mart to take action against
BPA-containing baby bottles.

So why blame the chemical industry for the nefarious doings of a rogue
NTP-activist cabal?

The industry had almost seven years to take political and legal action
against a clearly corrupted government process. There is no evidence that the
industry mounted any sort of vigorous public or behind-the-scenes defense of its
product.

Worse, a terrible precedent has been set that will haunt the development and
use of chemicals that improve the quality of our lives. While it is quite likely
BPA can be replaced by some other chemical and sometimes it does make sense from
a public relations perspective for an industry to "switch" rather than to
"fight" over a particular chemical, BPA wasn’t the only thing at stake. The use
of science in the regulatory process also was on the line.

BPA-maker Dow Chemical says on its Web site that "we support the development
of responsible, science-based laws, regulations, standards, practices and
procedures that safeguard the community, workplace and environment."

It’s going to take more than Web site lip service to live up to that
principle.