Monday, April 21, 2008

What's next after BPA?

The Canadian government has announced its policy toward bisphenol-A (BPA) and will ban the use of BPA in baby bottles. As with any policy there will be critics. Some questions will be raised as to why institute a ban only on baby bottles? Which political contributor stands to benefit? What is the risk of BPA being replaced by something worse? Are there worse chemicals out there that are not being banned? All of these are valid questions and I don't know where the answers are.

The effects of BPA were discovered by accident. Scientific testing at Stanford on yeast generated unexpected results. The source of these results was found to be BPA and the rest is history. This makes me wonder about what else is out there that we don't know about. What accidents need to happen for them to be found? The chemical experiment that is going on in our daily lives makes me wonder how many "diseases" are preventable and can be "cured" by eliminating these products. It looks more and more like we have sacrificed our health, our planet and our future for the sake of convenience and aesthetics.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

it's kind of sad/scary that it gets this way, especially when the effects of BPA were discovered by accident. it may be pure coincidence that stanford discovered these effects and it's frightening to think about what else in today's world could be that dangerous.