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BPA Coverage in the Local Media

Everytime I turn around I find a new article on BPA and polycarbonate bottles. This last Friday we were interviewed by KSNT NBC TV-27 out of Topeka:

http://www.ksnt.com/news/local/18195329.html

The Pitch, which is the weekly alternative publication from Kansas City, ran a cover story on BPA in their April 24-30 issue. Primarily the article covered interview’s with University of Missouri professors and researchers Frederick vom Saal, Wade Welsons and Susan Nagel. I would have preferred if The Pitch had made a stronger effort to cover both sides of this story. I did find this passage somewhat amusing:

In 2003, Welshons and vom Saal traveled to an international toxicology symposium in Germany, at the University of Berlin, where scientists from around the world were presenting papers on their research. Many of the papers presented were on bisphenol A.

A scientist named Jörg Oehlmann showed how bisphenol A in snails caused such an overgrowth in ovarian cells that the animals exploded and died.

A study by Gilbert Schönfelder found amounts of bisphenol A in human blood, specifically in the blood of pregnant mothers and in the placenta and umbilical-cord blood of their babies.

Then Waechter, the scientist with Dow Chemical who had visited vom Saal’s lab at MU, stood up and read the results of a study he’d co-written. The study, which contradicted Schönfelder’s, insisted that humans aren’t exposed to bisphenol A because they metabolize it completely in the liver. His findings had come from cultures he’d done with liver cells in petri dishes, not living animals.

“It was at that point that you went a little ballistic,” vom Saal says with a giggle, looking at Welshons.

Welshons says he stood up in the auditorium in Berlin and challenged Waechter’s facts.

“I was civil,” Welshons says. “I asked questions like, ‘On what basis do you accept this C-R-A-P instead of actual measurements from animals and people? What basis is there for that?’ And he ran away.”

“Waechter literally stopped taking questions and ran out of the room,” vom Saal says. “We’re in this big corridor, and Wade jumps up and runs after him, and he’s yelling, ‘Come back here! Come back here and answer this question!’ And Waechter ran out of the building with everybody in the audience sitting there.”

Other scientists at the meeting don’t remember it this way. Oehlmann, the scientist who did the snail study, writes in an e-mail, “I attended that meeting in Berlin in 2003 but do not remember a person leaving the room after being asked a particular question.” Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences at Johns Hopkins University who attended the Berlin symposium, tells The Pitch in an e-mail, “There were several heated discussions at the meeting, but I do not recall anything like this.”

http://www.pitch.com/2008-04-24/news/ever-since-university-of-missouri-
biologist-frederick-vom-saal-and-his-team-learned-the-dangers-of-bisphenol-a-and-
plastic-the-chemical-industry-has-been-trying-to-discredit-them/full

Stay tuned. I’m sure that there’s still more to come.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 8:07 am and is filed under Product Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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BPA Coverage in the Local Media

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