Anatomy of a Green Scare: Consumer Reports or Distorts Facts About BPA?

by Mary Grabar

It’s a chemical that has been used in everyday plastic products like eyeglasses, medical equipment, bottles, and food can linings for over fifty years.  But the compound Bisphenol A (BPA) has been the target of scare campaigns over the last few years.  On one hand critics contend that BPA at low doses can affect endocrine systems and reproduction, and cause birth or developmental effects, as well as cancer.  On the other hand, a search of the literature finds no single case of illness or death related to BPA.

Most recently, BPA came under attack November 2 when Consumers Union, the parent organization of the respected Consumer Reports, sent out a press release announcing the results of its lab tests that purportedly showed high levels of the suspect compound in 19 food products.  The authors of the Consumers Report article did not claim that they had found any harmful effects in anyone, just that BPA had been detected.

The Consumers Union press release inspired panic-inducing headlines.  ABC News, the Los Angeles Times, Fox News, and the New York Times dutifully announced the “results” with alarm.  In a separate commentary, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff compared the danger of BPA to those he has faced as a reporter of “threats from warlords, bandits and tarantulas.”

By comparison, the journal Toxicological Sciences (October 2009) published the results of a study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency which noted that the National Toxicology Program “rated the potential effects of low doses of BPA as an area of ‘some concern,’ whereas most effects were rated as of ‘negligible’ or ‘minimal’ concern.”  But this study, as well as numerous others that demonstrate BPA’s safety, does not make headlines.

At George Mason University’s STATS center, Trevor Butterworth has an entire archive of articles disputing claims and test results raising the alarm about BPA.  He cites an international array of scientists who have repeatedly refuted the claims of such tests.  Of the latest test funded by Consumers Union, Butterworth quotes Wolfgang Dekant, Professor of Toxicology at the University of Wurzburg, who has done testing on BPA for the European Union.  Dekant said he was  “’incredulous’” at the claims made by Consumers Union; the test, he says, was “’highly biased.’”

The Consumers Union’s release is the latest salvo in media campaigns against BPA, despite the fact, as Butterworth writes, that Consumers Union has not released the name of the lab conducting the experiments.  Yet absent this critically important piece of information, the authors of the Consumers Union report claim that current federal guidelines of 50 micrograms is based on outdated research from the 1980s and assert that “a 165-pound adult eating one serving from our sample, which averaged 123.5 ppb, could ingest about 0.2 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight per day, about 80 times higher than our experts’ recommended daily upper limit” [at 0.0024 micrograms].

Who are these experts?  An examination of the two scientists cited in the article reveals that they are part of a network of left-leaning researchers with political agendas.  A key participant is Pete Myers, described in the article as “chief scientist at Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit group based in Charlottesville, Va.”  According to Environmental Health News, Myers is not only chief scientist but founder and CEO of the group, which he created after serving as director of the W. Alton Jones Foundation and co-authoring Our Stolen Future, about endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment.  The introduction to this work, considered an environmental polemic by detractors, was written by then Vice President Al Gore.  A search, however, did not reveal a website for Environmental Health Sciences, nor a 990 tax return.

The other scientist cited in the Consumer Reports article is Frederick vom Saal, “a professor of developmental biology at the University of Missouri at Columbia and a leading researcher on BPA.”  A disclosure accompanying an article for the Journal of the Medical Association (JAMA), noted that vom Sall has served as “expert witness for the defendant in a trial in 2004 regarding the health effects of bisphenol,” served as a “consultant for in-preparation litigation regarding BPA,” and serves as “chief executive officer of XenoAnalytical LLC, which uses a variety of analytical techniques to measure estrogenic activity and BPA in tissues and leachates from products.”

The media and vom Saal are also well acquainted.  The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which in 2008 won several “environmental reporting” prizes, utilized vom Saal’s own laboratory to conduct experiments for the newspaper.  Butterworth notes the bias of the panel awarding the Columbia University’s John B. Oakes award; it featured members of National Public Radio and environmental groups.  Further, it turns out that an “outside expert” called on to evaluate the results, Patricia Hunt, has coauthored articles on BPA with vom Saal.  He, in turn, has championed her research.  Vom Saal and Hunt were also signatories of the “Chapel Hill Consensus,” a meeting in 2007 where 50 seemingly like-minded scientists who had been studying BPA gathered at the University of North Carolina to decide on the dangers of BPA.  This “Consensus” statement shows a network of many scientists who hold similar opinions on BPA and whose names sometimes appear together in work on “green” issues.

The circular relationships between researchers, activist organizations, and media outlets serve to create a continuous flow of questionable information about BPA.  Yet, many of those involved in such eye-brow raising research are set to accelerate anti-BPA research, thanks to stimulus funds from American taxpayers.

NEXT: How Stimulus Spending Fuels the BPA Scare


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Posted Nov 27th 2009 at 4:41 pm in Environment, Healthcare, Media Criticism, News, Politics | 62 Comments