What the Chemical Industry Doesn't Want You to Know about Everyday Products

By Elaine Shannon, AlterNet. Posted September 15, 2008.

It takes a lot of nerve to go up against the $3 trillion-a-year global chemical industry.

Ask University of Missouri-Columbia scientists Frederick Vom Saal and Wade Welshons. They've been in the industry's crosshairs for more than a decade, since their experiments turned up the first hard evidence that miniscule amounts of bisphenol A (BPA), an artificial sex hormone and integral component of a vast array of plastic products, caused irreversible changes in the prostates of fetal mice.  

Their findings touched off a steady drumbeat that has led to a ban on BPA-laden baby bottles in Canada, mounting support for a similar ban in the U.S., major retailers pulling plastic products off their shelves, a consumer run on glass baby bottles and a blizzard of scientific reports raising increasingly disturbing questions about the chemical's dangers at the trace levels to which people are routinely exposed.  

But back in early 1997, when the Missouri team produced its pioneering research on low-dose BPA, challenging the chemical-industrial complex seemed quixotic, even risky. Soon after the report appeared, a scientist from Dow Chemical Company, a major BPA manufacturer, showed up at the Missouri lab, disputed the data and declared, as Vom Saal recalls, "We want you to know how distressed we are by your research."  

"It was not a subtle threat," Vom Saal says. "It was really, really clear, and we ended up saying, threatening us is really not a good idea."  

The Missouri scientists redoubled their investigations of BPA and churned out more evidence of low-dose BPA toxicity to the reproductive systems of test animals. Industry officials and scientist allies fired back, sometimes in nose-to-nose debates at scientific gatherings, sometimes more insidiously.  

"I heard [chemical industry officials] were making blatantly false statements about our research," says Welshons. "They were skilled at creating doubt when none existed."  

On at least one occasion, the industry tried to mute Vom Saal's increasingly insistent voice. In 2001, according to three knowledgeable sources, a representative of the American Chemistry Council, the industry trade group, called an official at the Washington-based Society for Women's Health Research (SWHR) to urge that Vom Saal be barred from the dais at an upcoming convocation at Stanford University. Society scientific director Sherry Martz says the industry spokesman objected to Vom Saal's appearance at the prestigious event on grounds that his work was "very controversial, and not everybody believes what he's saying."  

"Our response," says Martz, "was no."

By that time, Vom Saal, Welshons and their Missouri colleagues realized that they had a tiger by the tail. The financial stakes were mind-boggling. The global chemical industry produces about 6 billion pounds of BPA annually, generating at least $6 billion in annual sales. The value of BPA-based manufactured goods, from cell phones and computers to epoxy coatings and dental bindings, is probably incalculable. Though scientists have known since the 1930s that BPA mimics estrogen in the body, for unrelated reasons, the chemical serves as an essential building block of hard, clear polycarbonate plastics and tough epoxy resins, ubiquitous materials in the modern world.  

"It's probably the largest volume endocrine-disrupting chemical in commerce," says Vom Saal. "This stuff is in everything." Because plastics made with BPA break down easily when heated, microwaved, washed with strong detergents or wrapped around acidic foods like tomatoes, trace amounts of the potent hormone leach into food from epoxy lacquer can linings, polycarbonate bottles and other plastic food packaging.  

Environmental Working Group studies have found BPA in more than half the canned foods and beverages sampled from supermarkets across the U.S., in baby bottles

and in the linings of nearly all infant formula cans. "Can you imagine," says Vom Saal, "extracting estrogen out of a packet of birth control pills and making baby bottles out of it? It's an act of insanity."  

But the industry's increasingly noisy denials backfired. Scientists surge toward burning questions the way news crews chase hurricanes. By the turn of the Millennium, dozens of scientists were launching their own investigations of the chemical. Among them was Washington State University reproductive scientist Patricia Hunt, who had become intrigued with BPA because of a laboratory accident. In 1998, she was studying eggs from normal and mutant mice when, she says, "all of a sudden, the control data went completely crazy and the eggs from perfectly normal females were showing us something really bizarre -- stronger abnormalities than we were seeing in the mutants."  

Hunt's search for lab contaminants led to a temporary lab aide who had washed the plastic cages and bottles with a caustic floor detergent, unleashing enough BPA into the control animals' food and water to scramble the chromosome alignment in their eggs.  

What Hunt saw under her microscope stunned her. "Like most Americans, I thought, my government protects me from this kind of stuff," she says. The incident convinced her that "we're up against big industry, and they're running pretty effective damage control." She locked down into BPA research for the better part of a decade, eventually concluding that "exposure to low levels of BPA -- levels that we think are in the realm of current human exposure -- can profoundly affect both developing eggs and sperm."  

See more stories tagged with: health, plastic, bpa

Elaine Shannon is an investigative editor with the Environmental Working Group.

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