People worried about chemicals in plastic aren't just "nervous Nellies," says Lynn Goldman, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Others, led by the plastic and vinyl industry, say recent reports are nothing but a scare campaign. "It is . . . foolish to ban something that's safe and has proven itself for decades," says Allen Blakey, a spokesman for the Vinyl Institute, an industry group. Blakey dismisses the main evidence of harm cited by the anti-plastic camp -- a set of studies that involved mostly animal subjects -- as "flimsy."
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis detected BPA in urine samples of nearly 93 percent of 2,517 people who took part in a national health survey from 2003 through 2004.
According to the CDC, women had higher average levels (2.9 micrograms per liter) than men (2.6); children age 6 to 11 had higher levels (4.5) than adults over 20 (2.5). These numbers are not in dispute.
Stopping the media pandemic to focus on real concentrations will require... More science -- more studies of short- and long-term effects, new models of interpreting animal research, better testing methods.
The case of BPA and phthalates is "more subtle" than the classic "one chemical, one disease" model, says Baier-Anderson, as in the case of asbestos or tobacco.
We need a new way, she says, to look at how the "simultaneous exposure to low levels of many chemicals throughout our lives can interact with [biological] systems."
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