As scientists get better at detecting the chemicals in our bodies, they're discovering that even tiny quantities of toxins can have a potentially serious impact on our health — and our children's future. Chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates — key ingredients in modern plastics — may disrupt the delicate endocrine system, leading to developmental problems. A host of modern ills that have been rising unchecked for a generation — obesity, diabetes, autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder — could have chemical connections. "We don't give environmental exposure the attention it deserves," says Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Children's Environmental Health Center at New York City's Mount Sinai Medical Center. "But there's an emerging understanding that kids are uniquely susceptible to environmental hazards."
The levels [of BPA] observed are considered well below the federal safety threshold of 50 micrograms per kg of body weight per day. But that recommendation was made 22 years ago, and in the time since, scientists have learned more about the effects of even a bit of BPA. In 1998, Patricia Hunt, a geneticist at Washington State University, found that female mice dosed with BPA had serious reproductive problems, including defective eggs. More recently, she published a study showing that the offspring of mice exposed to BPA while pregnant can end up with corrupted eggs, a situation that leads to trouble for their offspring. "That's a powerful effect," says Hunt. "You disrupt three generations with one exposure."
The science around endocrine disrupters is far from settled. Studies like Swan's show a correlation between phthalate exposure and developmental defects, but that doesn't mean the chemicals are causing the problems. Industry defenders point out that human exposure to BPA and phthalates is still well below safety levels set by the government and that health agencies around the world say the chemicals are safe for humans. And some peer-reviewed studies fail to show a positive connection between endocrine disrupters like BPA and health defects. "I think the research [on BPA] has been overhyped," says Richard Sharpe, an investigator at the Centre for Reproductive Biology at the Queen's Medical Research Institute in Edinburgh. "If you restrict the question to its estrogenic effects, I just don't see them."
If you want to market a new drug, you need to convince the FDA — in multiple tests, over the course of years — that it won't cause serious harm. If you want to sell a new pesticide, you need to prove the same thing. The burden of proof is on manufacturers to make the grade, and government regulators are the final judge.
But if you want to market a new chemical for use in a product — even one that will come into contact with children or pregnant women — it's up to the EPA to prove that it's unsafe, using whatever data are provided by the chemical company, with little power to ask for more. And if it's one of the 62,000 chemicals that were already in use when the TSCA went into effect in 1976 — a category that includes BPA — chances are it was never really tested by the government at all. "Chemicals are deemed safe until the EPA can prove that they are dangerous," says Richard Wiles, executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. "It's completely backward."
Reform alone, though, won't defuse the basic debate over how much of an impact chemicals really are having on human health — and when protective measures may go too far. Nearly everything we buy, sell and use depends on chemicals, and the industry employs 803,000 Americans. Replacing the keystone ingredients of modern life would be challenging, not to mention costly. And smarter regulation won't change the fact that the science on chemicals and health — especially for complex endocrine disrupters — will never be clear-cut, no matter how many studies each side carries out. "You can ban BPA all you want, but if there are no better materials, you'll just move to the next case," says Joel Tickner, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts' School of Health and Environment. "We need solutions that will be win-win."
Full Article at: Time - The Perils of Plastic
Are the amounts of synthetic chemicals we encounter daily a problem? Is it worth the risk to use modern products that contain toxic chemicals? Are their health risks being exaggerated, or are they being underplayed? Why should companies be allowed to mass produce chemicals without proving they are safe? Could modern life be possible without these potentially hazardous chemicals?
Discuss.
BTW, before anyone gets snarky, we're talking about
synthetic chemicals here.
Posts
This thread is actually more about synthetic chemicals in plastics.
Edit:
Surprise surprise perchlorate also forms naturally. Exaggerated in terms of distinction yes. I can show you naturally occurring chemicals that caused cows to bleed out, hemorrhage and die. Is that any more nasty than any synthetic chemical?
There is nothing about 'synthetic' chemicals that makes them inherently worse than 'natural' ones. Are chemicals in plastics a concern? Sure. But there's no need to make such a useless and frankly vague distinction.
The bottle of water in a plastic bottle. And that I drink three to four bottles of every day. And have drunk since I was a child.
The bottle of water that has had, in the recent past, a taste that would randomly be qualifiable from bottle to bottle as being considered "sewer water", or "extremely tainted". The supplier told me it may be because the bottlers are a bunch of sleazy fucks.
This explains so much.
The difference is that we know more about the natural chemicals that have been around forever than the synthetic ones that have been made in the last century.
No, we don't know more about the natural chemicals. Protein signaling pathways are way more complex than making polyethylene or polystyrene. The structure of DNA was discovered after plastics were mainstream.
Estrogen replacement for post-menopausal women was a huge controversy when the FDA found that the supplement was increasing the risk of various diseases and heart attacks.
Edit: That didn't sound exactly like what I was thinking. We know more about synthetics, except in relation to when it interacts with biology. In that case, science is at the same place we are with nearly every chemical synthetic or natural - relatively clueless.
Just put a filter on your tap. Cheaper anyways.
We never had so many children with Autism before we started vaccinating everyone.
So the argument here is that we should have the same standards for stuff we are deliberately putting in our bodies as for stuff that we use to clean crud off bathroom drains and probably comes plastered in "call the ER if you get this stuff on your skin" warnings?
Makes perfect sense.
I never finish anyth
Well, a lot of sex toys are made with phalate-containing plastics, so technically they are going in our bodies
But look, just because you're not ingesting a substance doesn't mean its not making its way into your body by other pathways, or that its not entering the food chain a few steps back from your mouth. This is not a clever thing that you have said.
Aye, this is the big thing many people like to ignore.
Flushing something down a toilet doesn't make it disappear, it sends it back into the water/food/etc cycle.
The big question is, does it stick around in that cycle long enough to come back to you and me?
And haven't their been a bunch of tests on rivers and such showing that alot of this stuff sticks around for a LONG time?
I didn't say there should be no consideration given to non-ingestables. But currently the world is divided into two groups, as far as safety regulations go: things that you stick in your body, and everything else. The former group requires the manufacturer to prove that it's not a health risk. The latter requires the government to prove that it is. This is not unreasonable, generally speaking. It is certainly better than requiring every manufacturer of every good ever to prove that everything they make is safe. I mean, everything contains chemicals, because "chemical" means nothing. And distinguishing between synthetic and natural chemicals is dumb, because there's nothing special about being synthetic other than the fact that the term sounds scary.
So in the end, we can either force companies to shell out billions "proving" that self-evidently safe products are really safe, or we can try to separate out particularly risky products that we think warrant extra concern. And if we're going with the latter (read: if we are not retards), then "stuff that goes in your body" is a pretty decent place to start.
If the current rules contain too many loopholes that make it easy for companies to squirm out of safe-guarding their wares, then we should work on that. But the idea that the government should have to provide evidence that a good or process is harmful isn't as crazy as that article is making it out, provided the government has reasonable resources at its disposal to do so.
I'm going to clarify this to be less of an asshole.
If you're drinking water that came in the plastic bottle their is like a 99% chance you're drinking from a bottle made of PET. PET doesn't have any BPA anywhere near it in the production process. At all. Zero. You're just as like to get a dose of BPA from a glass bottle.
The biggest culprit with regards to BPA is Polycarbonate (PC) materials. A common trade name is Lexan. It is an very tough, possibly clear, material that has a high resistance to impact. It is often used in reusable bottles for athletics and infants (along with a billion other places). That last one is a reasonable source of concern given their very low weight compared to their intake and we probably should avoid making baby bottles out of PC.
Regardless, Archonex, you read a piece of sensational journalism and bought into it and promptly blamed an unrelated issue that you were aware of. It is exactly this kind of half understanding that is so horribly damaging to public discussion in so many areas (thus my earlier vaccine comment.)
What do you define as "sticking in your body"? Things you eat? What about things you breathe in, or are absorbed through the skin?
Well, food and drugs. I was being flippant with "things you stick in your body". So all the things you mentioned would be included.
Just out of curiosity, have you started getting therapy for your anxiety issues yet? Given that whenever you start a thread, they seem to be on a topic like this, I wonder if you're channeling things.
Oh yeah, I haven't been thinking about stuff like this for months now. I just so happened to be looking at a Time magazine and saw this article (which, admittedly, did make me feel anxious again for a little while).
For those who don't know, PET stands for Polyethylene terephthalate.
In addition for those curious about what other possible health risks are involved in polymers today, look up what is added to PVC (polyvinyl chloride) as a plasticizer.
I was mostly making a joke.
However on a related note, the company that bottles the water I drink while out on the job are in fact, a bunch of sleazy bastards.
The dye for the caps apparently runs into the water at times, and several other people I know reported certain bottles tasting like sewer water (How they know what sewer water tastes like is beyond me, but having tasted a bad bottle of water myself, I have to say that's a rather apt description.). I got fairly sick after drinking a tainted bottle too.
The official explanation is that they "put too much ozone into the water", but noone quite believes them. It's been a problem for upwards of a year now, which goes far beyond the single shipment of water that they claim is the issue.
Either way, I can believe that there's a fair amount of nasty shit in the water. I remember reading a report saying that alot of the nastier synthetic chemicals that are dumped into the water don't typically dissipate over a short period of time. When they start to build up, you start to see problems, like what certain areas of China are supposedly facing now.
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OH GOD THE FRUIT IS MODIFIED GENETICALLY! THIS MEANS BAD SCIENCY THINGS ARE DONE TO IT! A BOOGAH BOOGAH BOOGAH!!!
edit: Before anyone asks, yes I am aware there are issues with GM organics. However, whenever it's presented as a 'bad thing' it basically boils down to 'it's science so it's BAD'. Just like the idea of synth chemicals. which incidentally is a term that makes no sense to me
Oh, honey. It comes from a tap.
If you think shit like BPA is a "non-issue" then you need to read more about BPA.
We never had so many children with autism before we started researching autism.
Asperger Syndrome didn't get any real studies until the early 80s. When you start studying something and defining its symptoms, it's not exactly strange that you suddenly start finding a lot more cases.
edit: and here's something to watch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se12y9hSOM0
Which would matter, were we we receiving significant doses of it. We're not, and it's not that mobile off of the plastics it's used in.
Also, this would be close to a completely worthless action.
The quantities of BPA in plastics are tiny. If they're capable of leeching out at all, then over a decade of use would have already extracted the material out.
One of the main ideas in the article I linked is that, while "the dose makes the poison", the size of the dose required to be poisonous might be smaller than is officially recognized.
I think the idea is to take them out of the production chain and reduce the overall environmental load. Also, like a lot of ag chems, the people making/handling the stuff are exposed to much higher levels. They're worth protecting.
Oh no - I agree with that. Reducing levels of bad things is good, especially if research suggests the limits should be set lower. What I meant was, replacing old plasticware is going to be close to worthless, if something in small quantity is supposed to be leeching from it. After a decade, you'd expect it all to be pretty much gone - or greatly reduced.