Bisphenol A,or BPA ~ BILL MOYERS: Welcome to THE JOURNAL. ... May 23, 2008

[Guest guest]

This stuff is in breast implants! . . . No wonder we're sick! - Rogene

May

23, 2008 BILL MOYERS: Welcome to THE JOURNAL. BILL

MOYERS: If it weren't for the

work of a muckraking journalist more than a century ago, the Federal Food and

Drug Administration, the FDA, might never have existed. In 1906, Upton Sinclair

published The Jungle, a fierce graphic account of the meatpacking industry's

filth, corruption and exploitation. His vivid, stomach-churning depiction

fueled a demand for more stringent inspections and the creation of the FDA to

keep food, medicine and other products fit for human consumption.

Last week, FDA officials and other government witnesses were called to a Senate

Committee hearing on the safety of Bisphenol A, or BPA that's a chemical used

in a variety of plastic products from baby sippy cups to eyeglasses. When

Senator Schumer and five of his colleagues introduced legislation calling for a

ban on BPA in all kids' products, they used information uncovered by the

investigative reporting of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. How the paper's

reporters got that story is the subject of this report from our colleagues at

Exposé, narrated by Sylvia Chase.

NARRATOR: Plastic. It's in almost

everything. Food is stored in it. People drink from it…work with

it…play with it. Less well known is that there is a chemical contained in

many plastics that is also found in 93 % of us.

It's called "Bisphenol A."

FREDERICK VOM SAAL: Bisphenol A is

actually the chemical used to make polycarbonate plastic. It's the hard, clear

plastic used in baby bottles, and it also is the lining of all metal cans made

in the United States - beer cans, soda cans, food cans. And this chemical leaches out of all of

these products into any kind of food or beverages that come in contact with it.

NARRATOR: Bisphenol A, BPA, is

what is known as an endocrine disruptor. Studies have shown that in lab

animals, it causes breast and testicular cancer, diabetes and hyperactivity.

Its effects on humans are not entirely known. The manufacturers of BPA, and

their lobbyists, say it is safe.

U.S. regulators agree. One team of

investigative journalists decided to ask…why? ne Rust is a science

reporter with the MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL.

SUZANNE RUST: When I was a

graduate student, I read this article in the New Yorker. The theory was that

there were chemicals in the environment that were somehow messing with the

reproductive system. And then I got into journalism, and suddenly these science

stories kept coming across my desk. The managing editor of my paper was really

excited about one of the stories I had written. It was on this chemical,

Bisphenol A, and he was like, "You interested in this?" I said,

"Yeah."

GEORGE STANLEY: I went to ne

and said, "We know breast, prostate and other forms of these cancers

related to the endocrine system are on the rise in humans. We know this stuff

causes it in lab animals. We've got to look into this."

MARK KATCHES: Well, I think the

central question that we came up with from the get go was, "Why isn't

anything being done to address the issue?" So we set our sites on the

regulatory efforts, what the EPA had been doing. It turns out, not much.

NARRATOR: Endocrine disruptors

were first identified as the cause of wildlife abnormalities in the early 90s.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration,

though, repeatedly reassured the public that BPA, at least, was safe.

The agencies cited studies done in the 1980s. But prompted by an outcry from

advocacy groups, President Bill Clinton signed the Food Quality Protection Act

in 1996. That same year, the Safe Drinking Water Act was amended.

The combined legislation promised a chemical screening program of endocrine

disruptors to be overseen by the EPA. The goal was to determine whether or not

they were dangerous to human beings.

1998 - the EPA, headed by Carol Browner, sets a deadline to fast track the

testing of 15,000 chemicals suspected as endocrine disruptors….

1999 - the EPA misses the deadline. The Natural Resources Defense Council sues

the agency to enforce screening. 2001 - a new administration takes office;

Todd Whitman becomes head of the EPA.

2003 - two more suits are brought against the EPA, one by a coalition of

environmentalists and advocacy groups…the other by the attorneys general

of four states. The suits attempt to force the agency into compliance with the

food quality protection act….

2007 - 11 years after the laws were passed…the EPA had yet to screen its

first chemical.

Mark Katches assigned two members of what the paper calls its "watchdog

team" to join ne Rust in exploring why:

Cary Spivak…and Meg Kissinger.

MEG KISSINGER: You can go as, you

know, walk into any grocery store or go to any makeup counter, and you know,

you'll find plenty of products that contain chemicals that are suspected, and

that's the big word, you know, they're suspected of health concerns. And the

mainstream media just hasn't paid that much attention to it.

NARRATOR: The Journal Sentinel

began to give some attention to the Environmental Protection Agency in June of

2007.

CARY SPIVAK: At first, they were very

cooperative, but when we said, "Look, that Congress passed a law saying

you're supposed to be screening these chemicals, and you keep pointing out that

you're working on it, but now it's 2000 - at the time 2007 - you have yet to

screen a chemical." And they realized that we were really pushing them and

demanding answers. They got much more difficult to deal with.

NARRATOR: is the

head of the EPA. The paper would report he declined repeated requests for an

interview.

MARK KATCHES: And we're the

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. We're not The Washington Post or The New York

Times. So when you start calling officials from the EPA, you're not going to

get the same kind of attention that, that those newspapers would get. So we had

to be really persistent.

CARY SPIVAK: There was a period of time where

they just said, "We've answered all your questions." We said,

"We don't care if you think you answered all our questions." We just

kept going. And even on basic things they were very difficult to deal with.

NARRATOR: The reporters eventually

learned that the EPA, though it hadn't tested a single one of the 15,000

chemicals promised, had already spent some $80 million on the endocrine

disruptor program.

GEORGE STANLEY: And here's tens of

millions of dollars, our tax dollars being spent and not a single chemical has

ever been tested, to this day. So, the more they dug, the more they found.

NARRATOR: He team also learned

that only in 2008 did the agency plan to screen its first chemicals- just 73 of

them, and not including BPA…and they wouldn't even be finished with that

until 2010.

CARY SPIVAK: That took literally weeks to get

answers from them to give us the date of 2010.

NARRATOR: Elaine Francis, the

national program director of the agency's endocrine disruptors research

program, told the paper:

"Clearly, we would have liked to have been a lot further along. But

science tends to move at its own pace." NARRATOR:

But the pace of science was far from the only issue. The reporters wanted to

know: just what was the science saying? The journalists found two camps, each

with its own view of the science of Bisphenol A. One includes Dr. Frederick Vom

Saal.

FREDERICK VOM SAAL: In our test

system with human breast cancer cells, what we found with Bisphenol A was very

different than what happens with a natural hormone produced in your ovaries.

NARRATOR: Vom Saal is a biologist

at the University of Missouri . He has

studied Bisphenol A for more than a decade. In 1997, a team of researchers led

by Vom Saal published a peer-reviewed study showing that when BPA was

introduced to human breast cancer cells, it penetrated the cells and made them

grow rapidly.

FREDERICK VOM SAAL: And as a

result of that, we got interested that maybe this chemical was a lot more

potent than anybody had previously thought. And so we did a study where we

administered it to mice, and found that at a dose 25,000 times below what

anybody had ever tested, we caused damage to the entire developing male

reproductive system.

NARRATOR: Chemical companies who

make or have made Bisphenol A say that people have little or nothing to fear

from what are known as endocrine disruptors.

MEG KISSINGER: The chemical

companies' basic answer was, "There's no known direct effect that these

chemicals are harming anybody."

NARRATOR: The paper heard the same

from the industry's powerful trade and lobbying association, the American

Chemistry Council. The ACC's Marty Durbin said: "Science supports our

side…."

An industry consultant and former EPA regulator, Lamb, agreed, saying,

"I'm very comfortable with my kids and grandkids using these

products…because i believe the industry has done the studies that need to

be done and that they're interpreting them properly."

In defense of the safety of Bisphenol A, the companies and the ACC cited

studies they funded themselves, some paid for by the ACC, which has an annual

75 million dollar budget.

SUZANNE RUST: They say the reason

they get these, these results is that their studies are better than any of the

academic studies, any of the government studies. They can use more animals;

they have better controls in their laboratory.

NARRATOR: But one EPA biologist,

L. Earl Gray, Jr., charged the industry with flooding the EPA with studies.

Rosner, professor of history and public health at

Columbia University ,

explained why, telling the paper chemical makers have "… learned

that if you play on the uncertainty of danger, you're going to be able to stop

regulatory action…"

CARY SPIVAK: What you have, is you have these

studies will come out, and they have to weigh that against the academic studies

or other studies that are questioning it. And if nothing else, the more you

give the EPA additional studies, the more time it's eating up. The more time it's

eating up, the more you're selling your product. You've won.

NARRATOR: The ACC's Marty Durbin

denied that industry tries to stall the EPA's work. The paper posted this

interview with him on its website.

DURBIN AUDIO: "If it was our

interest to delay things around here, we'd just sit on our hands and see

whether or not EPA gets any funding. But we actually, year after year, go up to

the Congress using our resources and lobby to have essential funding to the EPA

for these particular research programs. So, again I think our record, our

record speaks for itself. We've been fully supportive of moving this process

along."

NARRATOR: Again and again, the

reporters heard two different stories. One example: they found a statement on

an ACC-sponsored website. It said that a person would have to ingest over 500

pounds of canned food every day to be at risk from BPA found in the containers.

Other scientists told the reporters that even at very low doses, BPA and

similar chemicals can affect lab animals…the concern is that they might

harm human beings, too.

SUZANNE RUST: It surprised me too

how much rancor there was about this chemical. I mean, you would talk to some

scientists, and you know, they would tell you that the sky was falling. I mean,

we talked to others, and they would tell you that it was fine, and then in the

same sort of breath they would cut the first scientist down personally. I mean,

it was just kind of amazing. I felt like I'd walked into sort of a geeky

chemistry war zone.

NARRATOR: After three months of

reporting, Rust, Kissinger and Spivak pulled together the information they had

culled about the debate over endocrine disruptors.

MEG KISSINGER: And I remember we

had a couple of stories sketched out, and we were pretty happy with them, and it

was really basically saying, "There's all these chemicals out there, the

government's not testing them as they promised they would. A lot of other

countries are much more diligent about this." And then here's kind of a

lot of the infighting. So we turned these stories in, and we're all excited,

and kind of like, "Oh, oh okay, well, that's a wrap. " And not at

all. We were called into Mark Katches' office, and basically got our fannies

handed to us on a platter. And he just said, you know, "You're not there,

yet." So, we were crushed.

NARRATOR: The story was at an

impasse. The editors wanted more work. More investigation. More examination of

the science.

MARK KATCHES: We realized that the

story would have a lot more authority if we went back and looked at all of the

studies that had been done, and really tried to conclusively show, is this a

problem, or is it not?

NARRATOR: Before she had become a

journalist, ne Rust had been a graduate student in Biological

Anthropology. Now the paper would call on her experience with scientific

methodology.

SUZANNE RUST: I'm not intimidated

by scientific studies, right, I'm not afraid to read a methods section. I'm not

afraid to read results section. I had enough through background in

endocrinology, where I was fairly familiar with the terms they were using.

BECKY LANG: So Mark was like,

"Why we don't just do our own analysis?" And so he turned to ne

and said, "Do you think you could do this analysis?" Yeah, she

thought she could.

NARRATOR: To begin her research,

Rust headed back to school…to the UW Madison library where she had done

her graduate work.

SUZANNE RUST: I searched for

Bisphenol A, looking for those criteria which I had initially set out for

myself, which were live laboratory animals with spines. Where were the authors,

what institutes did they work for, who funded the study, what the author's

conclusions about the chemical were, how many animals they used to come up with

these conclusions…

NARRATOR: Rust also turned to

another public source of medical and scientific studies of Bisphenol A, done by

both industry and academic scientists.

SUZANNE RUST: I went to PubMed,

which is a database online that sort of puts together all medical and

scientific studies, and I put together a huge database with all of this

information.

NARRATOR: In all, Rust evaluated

258 studies done over two decades involving lab animals with spines, the type

scientists consider most relevant to human beings.

SUZANNE RUST: Right away, you

could see that 80% of these studies all found that this chemical caused harm.

NARRATOR: More than half the

studies, 168 of them, evaluated Bisphenol A at low doses. The vast majority of

those - 132 of the 168 - showed harm to lab animals. And, Rust would report,

"nearly three-fourths of the studies that found the chemical had no

harmful effects were funded by industry." Rust's overall conclusion: an

overwhelming majority of the studies found BPA to be harmful in lab animals -

causing breast and testicular cancer, diabetes, hyperactivity, obesity, low

sperm counts, miscarriage and other reproductive failures. Studies paid for by

the chemical industry were much less likely to find damaging effects or

disease.

MARK KATCHES: That's where this

story took on a whole different dynamic. Because you were able to show,

conclusively, through that analysis of all those studies, that hundreds of

researchers across the world had found problems with Bisphenol A. And yet,

nobody had done anything, and only a few studies had found that it was safe.

And most of those studies were funded by the chemical industry themselves. And,

and that's when you knew you had something really, really special to tell to

readers.

NARRATOR: All of the studies Rust

had evaluated were in the public domain, as available to government regulators

as they were to a reporter in Milwaukee .

As the reporters were working on their story, they knew the government was

continuing to look into Bisphenol A. They would report on one panel funded in

part by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. It consisted

of experts who directly studied the chemical. That panel found in 2007 - quote

- "great cause for concern" about BPA.

Meanwhile, the National Toxicology Program, the NTP, was in the process of

coming up with its own brief on Bisphenol A.

Part of the Department of Health and Human Services, the NTP evaluates

chemicals and other agents of public health concern. In 2007, the NTP convened

a panel composed of scientists who didn't directly study BPA, but would

evaluate the work of those who did.

Among the panel's conclusions: While for pregnant women, fetuses and children

there is some concern about neural and behavioral effects…there is

minimal concern for… …prostate effects… …potential

accelerated puberty… …there is negligible concern for birth defects

and malformation.

For adults, the concern was essentially negligible. In light of her own

findings, ne Rust wondered how the panel had arrived at those conclusions.

SUZANNE RUST: We pulled out every

single study looked at in their review of Bisphenol A studies. And so we just

wrote down what the study was, who funded it, was it government, industry? And

then, more specific, what government agency funded it, what industry funded it,

what kind of animal did they look at, what was the strain, what were the doses

used?

NARRATOR: Among the paper's

findings: Some of the studies the NTP panel considered were chosen by a

consultant with links to firms that made Bisphenol A. The panel rejected

academic studies that found BPA harmful, citing inadequate methods, but

accepted industry-funded studies using the same methods…to conclude the

chemical does not pose risks. It also accepted two studies finding no harm

funded by former BPA-maker General Electric. They were done some 30 years ago. Neither

was peer reviewed.

MEG KISSINGER: I try not to be too

cynical, but I don't trust that. I would rather have an independent entity

testing the stuff to know, versus the guy that's making it.

NARRATOR: And the panel didn't

accept any studies that found BPA harmful at low doses. Why? The paper reported

the panel's chairman, Chapin, said that once the panel weeded out

studies it believed had been done poorly, no studies remained that showed

effects from low doses.

Chapin is a toxicologist who has worked in both government and industry. He

defended the panel's work, saying that it had accepted studies that followed

good lab practices and were backed with strong data, regardless of where they

originated. He told the paper, "We didn't flippin' care who does the

study."

In November 2007, the reporters rolled out a two-part series entitled

"Chemical Fallout."

Among its conclusions: the government's contention that BPA is safe is based on

outdated, incomplete government studies and research heavily funded by the

chemical industry.

CARY SPIVAK: And we said, "Why this is

important to you. Why you should care about what's in the containers holding

your food or other products. And that this is all over the place and that there

are legitimate scientific questions over the safety."

GEORGE STANLEY: We saw immediate

reaction in Milwaukee in the market place. As soon as mothers read this, they stopped buying baby

bottles that had this plastic. And they had to go order a bunch of baby bottles

made of glass, and BPA-free plastic.

MARK KATCHES: We have not gotten a

single demand for retraction, no clarification request from the chemical

industry. They've had nothing that they could come back to us on.

NARRATOR: That doesn't mean the

industry has stopped defending Bisphenol A. In answer to a question in an

online chat the paper sponsored, ACC spokesperson Hentges wrote:

"It is not correct that only industry studies support the safety of

products made from Bisphenol A…government and scientific bodies with no

stake in the matter have impartially reviewed all of the scientific evidence to

reach their conclusions. The recent NTP panel evaluation is a good

example."

CARY SPIVAK: A lot of these plastic products,

people like. It makes life more convenient. The battles are going to become

more intense as time goes on. You're having more studies come out raising

questions about it.

GEORGE STANLEY: We still don't

have the answers to a lot of the questions. And we'll be continuing the

investigation.

MEG KISSINGER: This is Meg

Kissinger calling with The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel…

BILL MOYERS: On April 15th, the

National Toxicology Program, the NTP, going beyond its own panel's preliminary

conclusions, issued a brief, it stated, in part: "…the possibility

that Bisphenol A may alter human development cannot be dismissed."

THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL reported that this was the first time a federal

agency has acknowledged that BPA is potentially dangerous to humans.

Meanwhile, Canada 's

government has announced its intention to ban the sale of plastic baby bottles

containing BPA and last Thursday, the California State Senate voted to forbid

the use of BPA in childcare products. That's it for THE JOURNAL. We'll be back next

week.

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