BPA BS

(Originally posted by my husband on NRO)

The FDA appears to have given in to the greens on the safety of a ubiquitous chemical, BPA. Angela Logomasini has more on the background to BPA and the reasons given for the change.

What is perhaps most striking about this decision is that the supposedly safety-conscious Europeans have recently come to exactly the opposite conclusion, as Mike Fumento relates:

In 2006 the European Union’s Food Safety Authority conducted a risk assessment focusing on the threat to infants. It ultimately raised the Tolerable Daily Intake by a factor of five, which is to say it found BPA much safer than was first believed. Mind you, this is the same EU that has placed advisory warnings on cell phones and whose residents run in terror at the sight of a grain of genetically modified corn.

Two years later the EU conducted an update and as Trevor Butterworth of STATS has documented, since then there’s been:

• A review by Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (2007)
• An examination of claims of neurotoxicity by the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety (2008)
• An evaluation by the French Food Safety Agency (2008)
• A risk assessment by NSF International, a World Health Organization collaborative center (2008)
• A review of new data by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (2008)
• A survey of canned drink products by Health Canada (2009)
• A risk assessment by Food Standards Australia/New Zealand (2009)
• A modeling study of BPA in humans by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (2009).

None of these prompted any warnings or restrictions on BPA use.

If there were an IPCC for chemical research, and it was in any way honest, it would clearly support the idea that BPA is safe in its current use, but does that mean anything to the greens? No, their "progressive" war on progress and the conveniences of modern civilization must go on. One hopes that Cass Sunstein, an opponent of the precautionary principle, pays attention to any regulations emerging from this volte-face (and to some other issues as well).