Mea Culpa

Originally when I read about the craziness of BPA I sent an email to all my mom friends as well as posting here. Well, it appears I was misled. Since I have already written to them I will simply post that email here.

It appears I owe you all a giant apology. So, I'm sorry for scaring you!!!

I have been doing a lot of reading on the subject of BPA's in plastics in the last 2 days. Here are a couple things I've found out. First of all the highest level of concern that the US Toxicology report lists is a simple "some" concern about BPA exposure for infants and possibly behavioral/neurological affects. (see link: http://zrecs.blogspot.com/2008/04/national-toxicology-program-concurs.html) This report has not even been peer reviewed yet, that's scheduled for June. Which means that it might get thrown out all together.

But the biggest thing I found was this link from a friend of mine.
http://www.stats.org/stories/2008/should_baby_bottles_feb9_08.html
The entire website is about how we interpret data and their goal is to correct misleading or false media reports about science. Statistics can be twisted to say pretty much anything you want them to.
This article in particular talks about how Europe, Japan, and even a separate US study have all found the levels of BPA leaching out of plastic to be so low as to be considered non-existent. And the study that is causing all the uproar here is based on really bad science and one guy's hypothesis that trace amounts of this chemical (which mimics estrogen) can have the same effects as large doses. Plus these studies were done on mice and rats which digest this chemical differently than humans do. In this case that means that the effects on humans wouldn't be the same at all.

Do with this information what you will. The links are still good if you are looking for totally BPA free plastics. However I am relieved to know that this appears to be a major distortion of the truth and my son is not in dire jeopardy because of one chemical - which kind of doesn't make sense anyway considering how many years this has been used and we haven't seen things like what happened to the thalidomide babies.

What I meant by this last line (which I now see could be rather confusing) is that if all the bad things could really happen that they are claiming this chemical does then we would have seen it long before now.