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The Epic BPA Battle
Posted September 17, 2008 by Shakti Sombrero
The FDA is sticking to its guns amid the latest study to "raise questions" about BPA's safety in plastic bottles. The FDA's cross-agency review has stated that no health risk exists at current BPA exposure levels. This finding agrees with reviews conducted by the European Food Safety Authority and Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.
So what's the fuss, you ask? Bandwagon researchers in search of funding are hopping on board the red-hot BPA bus (it has racing stripes, yellow windows, chain steering wheel, and kickass rims) and combing statistics to "possibly link" Bisphenol-A to a laundry list of diseases and conditions, the latest being heart disease:
The researchers did a broad search for diseases that might show an association, generally providing weaker evidence. In particular, there was no prior reason to suspect that heart disease might be linked to BPA. They used statistical modeling of the health survey population to make their comparisons. For example, fatter people had higher levels of the compound, and the researchers tried to correct for that with statistics.
Recent media reports have carried stories "possibly linking" BPA to...
No doubt there's more to come (Extraneous nipples? Hideous face mutations? X-ray vision?), given the nature of statistics and their propensity to be read however one wants to read them. There's never any cause-and-effect evidence between BPA and the diseases in question...just "questions being raised", guilt-laden innuendos for more funding, and the usual terrifying headlines. Some of these studies even contradict the others; for instance the one linking heart disease found the cancer link to be invalid. But you don't get that from headlines.
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Jan 25 - Mar 8, 2008
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