Europe Protects Babies from BPA While the USA Does Almost Nothing

On Thanksgiving Day, European Union’s executive commission announced that bisphenol-A (BPA) will be banned from baby bottles in Europe come June 2011. The commission approved the proposal to ban BPA in baby bottles, citing concerns of BPA’s ability to “Disrupt the immune system, stimulate tumor growth and interfere with proper development of young children.” Of course in a rub to parents in America, this announcement came just after a similar measure to ban BPA in sippy cups and baby bottles was dropped from a federal food safety bill during debate in the U.S. Senate. While some U.S. government leaders agreed on the measure, the American Chemistry Council, convinced Republican senators to kill the measure. Go USA!

This news, by the way coincides with a fresh argument against BPA in the US by Frederick vom Saal, a biologist and one of the world’s leading researchers on the negative health effects of BPA in humans and animals. Vom Saal adamantly advocates that BPA should be immediately removed from all products as soon as possible, citing that BPA is similar to DES, another synthetic hormone that caused numerous health problems in thousands of women in the 1940s and 1950s. Vom Saal further maintains that American businesses and regulators have glossed over, or flat out concealed the many dangers of BPA.

Ken Cook, president and co-founder of Environmental Working Group, notes, “It is absolutely unacceptable that American babies are born pre-polluted with this toxic chemical.” In fact, Canada and seven U.S. states agree with Vom Saal and Cook and have taken direct action to limit the use of the chemical BPA. Some leading baby product manufacturers have even stopped using BPA to make baby bottles, but the fact that our government still, in spite of all of this, sides with the American Chemistry Council and other major organizations over parents and babies is slack at best and at worst is extremely dangerous and disconcerting.