BPA hysteria predictable
I earlier wrote about the “war on polycarbonate bottles“, and it seems that I was correct with my prediction of hysteria.
Health Canada has taken the step of announcing they intend to ban the import, sale, and advertising of polycarbonate baby bottles containing bisphenol A (BPA). This is despite the fact that human exposures are less than the levels deemed to be potentially unsafe.
So the upcoming results of the study failed to meet its endpoint, but “just for the margin of safety, we’ll ban it anyway.”. What’s the point of having a study when you’re just going to throw away the results?
Naturally, everybody is taking this as a confirmation that BPA is evil, deadly and must be eradicated.
Of course, politically, this is absolutely the correct decision. First, you look like that you’re a public defender of babies, and everybody loves babies. Secondly, chances are there will be some parent out there that will make the claim that their baby died or is suffering of some symptom of BPA exposure, all because the government failed to put a ban on BPA. So by taking this action, you preemptively remove the political risk of having some parent in the spotlight.
While this decision is nothing at the level of banning DDT (which directly resulted in millions of deaths due to malaria), it still is disturbing.
Once again, I say:
My hunch is that polycarbonate bottles, at least for everyday household use, are perfectly safe. My additional hunch is that when you stick polycarbonate bottles in the microwave and superheat liquids inside, you will cause leaching of plastic residue to the liquid.
This goes for a lot of things – if you overheat your Teflon frying pan to 450C on the stove, chances are you’re going to be ingesting some Teflon in your diet. It’s no different with BPA or most other containers.
I can just imagine people in the future facing worse problems in the future when they use metallic containers and start exhibiting symptoms of ingesting too much metallic byproduct as it begins to rust.