I thought this segment on Fox News was a good description of the dangers of bisphenol A. (In a bit of irony from an environmental perspective, you have to watch a short add for an SUV at the beginning of the video.) Anyway, I am so glad that this is finally being discussed in the mainstream media. The day this chemical is finally banned in the United States, I am going to throw a huge party.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
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3 comments:
This ranks up there with Bush proclaiming the nation is addicted to oil: absolutely on-target, but from a source you never thought would admit it. Maybe there just comes a time when even Fox News can't ignore the elephant in the room. (Of course, that doesn't stop them from putting an SUV ad in front of it...)
Anyway, I'm wondering how many of these reports it will take for people to really appreciate the scale of the problem. In part I think people are so saturated with reports of the dangers surrounding them that it just becomes another shrug/"oh well". Perhaps it's because the effects are so insidious and work in hidden ways: the cause-and-effect isn't immediately apparent. If people grew a third arm after eating a can of tuna, they'd see the connection; but when they develop breast cancer it's difficult to consider twenty-plus years of eating out of microwaved plastic containers as possibly contributing.
This really is where a federal agency should be connecting the dots and advising change or at least announcing further research; yet instead it issues industry-complacent statements without acknowledging serious questions raised by this sort of recent research. So long as corporate spinmeisters like the one appearing in this report can point to dismissive FDA statements, many people are simply going to say "oh, the FDA says there's nothing to worry about." If they aren't worried about Bisphenol-A, they should at least be worried about a federal agency that doesn't seem to care.
I think the problem is with the chemical industry insisting that there is a debate about the effects of Bisphenol A. It's the same thing that worked for the auto industry in terms of global warming for decades. What we need is an 'Al Gore' of BPA.
Sounds like a job for The Future Earthling...!
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