Opinion: Of baby brains and bisphenol
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I want to say one word to you, George W. Bush, just one word. Are you listening?
The plastics in our baby bottles and canned goods -- or more specifically, a chemical that hardens those plastics called bisphenol A -- may be scrambling children’s brains and screwing up their hormonal systems. I say ‘may be,’ because nobody really knows. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration said the amount of bisphenol that leeches out of food containers is too small to harm even infants. But today another group of government scientists from the National Toxicology Program reiterated its earlier claim that the risks to humans can’t be ruled out.
So which scientists do we trust? Confronted with the choice, it’s always best to pick the ones least vulnerable to political influence from the White House. By now it’s common knowledge that Bush’s political hacks have suppressed, downplayed or misrepresented the work of scientists in any agency whose conclusions have differed from the administration’s viewpoints. Most of the interference has happened in the environmental arena, particularly in regard to findings on global warming by such agencies as NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but it has happened in public health, too; two FDA commissioners overruled their own advisory panel and in-house staff when they banned over-the-counter sales of a morning-after contraceptive, and the National Cancer Institute has suggested a link between abortion and breast cancer that isn’t supported by research.
Government regulators are supposed to protect citizens, not an ideology. In the case of bisphenol, I’m more inclined to believe the National Toxicology Program than the FDA, because the former is supervised by a broad committee of federal agencies and relies on multiple external groups for advice, making it harder to manipulate. The American Chemistry Council rightly points out that most of the studies on bisphenol have been performed on animals and the results don’t necessarily apply to humans, which is why there is so much uncertainty about the chemical. Until more is known, though, parents would be wise to feed their babies out of glass bottles like the one in the photo above.
* Photo by Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times