Posts Tagged ‘ BPA ’

FDA Taking Baby Steps on BPA

January 21st, 2010. By Hunter West

BPA Molecule Last week the US Food and Drug Administration did an about-face on its stance with regard to bisphenol-A (BPA), saying Friday that it has had “some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children,” and would join other federal health agencies in studying the chemical in both animals and humans.

This, in contrast to its report of 2008, when the agency deemed the chemical safe.

Not that the FDA is saying that BPA is unsafe. Far from it. ”If we thought it was unsafe, we would be taking strong regulatory action,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, the principal deputy commissioner of the drug agency, at a news briefing late last week.

However, it is a hint—baby steps here—that the FDA is taking a harder line on issues than it appeared to take previous to the Obama Administration. Needless to say safety advocates are buoyed by the change of position, short of being overjoyed given their entrenched view that the FDA has not gone far enough.

The chemical industry from whence the BPA originates, is also not happy with the news.

Hardly surprising, as both camps line up and defend their respective positions—the chemical industry saying that the FDA’s concerns are unfounded, while the safety advocates say the FDA hasn’t gone far enough. Then there’s the FDA, trying to come up in the middle and be fair to everybody.

But at least they’re looking. Rather than remain cocooned in a kind of Pleasantville (the movie, with apologies to any real ‘Pleasantvilles’ out there), outfitted with blinders and assuming that everybody, everywhere will be doing

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Tags: BPA, FDA
Posted in Personal Injury | No Comments »

Sex Toys Need to Be Safe

December 31st, 2009. By Hunter West

Sex Toys...what's in them is as important as what you put in them It’s a titillating subject to be sure and one that would be expected to serve as the butt of many a joke in the locker rooms of the nation. The fact remains, however that sex toys comprise a legitimate product component in the retail industry—and like any product that is used for the purposes to which they were designed, it needs to be safe.

It may not be.

Earlier this month in Canada (known affectionately as the Great White North where it gets so cold in the winter that residents alternate between outdoor sports and the indoor variety with their…well…never mind), a Liberal Member of Parliament issued a communiqué to the Canadian Health Minister with regard to sex toys manufactured with the dreaded bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates.

The latter are chemicals used to make plastic sex toys soft and flexible.

All playfulness aside, the safety concern for sex toys is not unlike previous health issues that have surfaced over the chemical’s use in things such as baby bottles, the lining of food cans and

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Tags: BPA, Health Canada, Phthalates, Sex Toys
Posted in Personal Injury | 1 Comment »

BPA Paper Tigers: “Check The Receipts”

October 22nd, 2009. By Hunter West

Some receipts have been found to have BPA As LawyersandSettlements revealed today there is a new and disturbing source of bisphenol-A (BPA).

Move over, plastic water bottles. Enter the cash register and credit card receipt. Something we handle every day, keep in our wallets, pile on top of our desks….

According to John C. Warner, of the Warner Babcock Institute of Green Chemistry in Wilmington, Massachusetts BPA contained in electronic cash register and credit card receipts has been a problem for some time.

It was about ten years ago when BPA first appeared on the radar screen, a time when Babcock was teaching green chemistry at the University of Massachusetts. His former career with Polaroid taught him a thing or two about thermal imagining papers, a subject he talked about in an interview with ScienceNews published on October 7^th.

Manufacturers would coat a powdery layer of BPA onto one side of a piece of paper together with an invisible ink, he said. “Later, when you applied pressure or heat, they would merge together and you’d get color.”

At the time, in the ’90s he thought little about the technology, he told ScienceNews, other than the fact he thought it was clever. However, when the health concerns about BPA began to emerge, he looked into it further—and he was in a perfect position to do so. As a professor of green chemistry at the University of Massachusetts, he had a ready gang

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Tags: BPA, BPA receipts
Posted in Defective Products, Emerging Issues | 3 Comments »