The Next Baseless Consumer Scare
peter on Apr 19 2008 at 2:56 pm | Filed under: Peter's Page
Yesterday our flappy-headed friends to the North fired the opening salvo in the next ridiculous consumer scare that, thanks to New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, is sure to be convulsing US consumer markets soon. The enemy this time? BPA, a.k.a. bisphenol-a, a chemical used in the production of polycarbonate, the plastic best known for it’s use in re-usable water bottles and plastic baby bottles. And of course this massive intervention is accompanied by the usual, schizophrenic “danger! danger! But there’s nothing to fear” language that’s typically heard when the government gallops in to save us from nothing:
“We’re not waiting to take action to protect our people and our environment from the long-term effects of bisphenol-a,” the environment minister, John Baird, told a news conference, where he displayed an array of baby bottles made from plastics that do not use the material. The health minister, Tony Clement, told reporters that after reviewing 150 research papers and conducting its own studies, his department concluded that children up to the age of 18 months were at the most risk from the chemical. Mr. Clement said that animal studies suggested “behavioral and neural symptoms later in life.” Potentially unsafe exposure levels are far lower for children than for adults, Mr. Clement said, and he and Mr. Baird both said that adults who use plastic containers made with the chemical were not at risk. “For the average Canadian consuming things in those products, there is no risk today,” Mr. Clement said.
Of course the ironic part of all this is that polycarbonate became the shatter-less choice for spring water and for lining steel food cans precisely due to the fact that it doesn’t impart the “plastic” taste to its contents—even over long periods of time—that other popular polymers eventually do. As far as the science goes, it’s extrapolated from the results of animal experimentation, but searching the internet I could find no mention of a single suspected case of BPA poisoning anywhere. This of course will not prevent thousands of lawsuits citing phony symptoms, but hey, it’s for the children, right? We can’t have our baby daughters becoming lesbians can we?
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