Girls Now Begin Puberty Aged Nine

Girls Now Begin Puberty Aged Nine

BPA, Plastics & Chemical Poisoning

GROWING numbers of girls are reaching puberty before the age of 10, raising fears of increased sexual activity among a new generation of children.
Scientists believe the phenomenon could be linked to obesity or exposure to chemicals in the food chain, and is putting girls at greater long-term risk of breast cancer.
A study has revealed that breast development in a sample of 1,000 girls started at an average age of 9 years and 10 months — an entire year earlier than when a similar cohort was examined in 1991.
The research was carried out in Denmark in 2006, the latest year for which figures were available, but experts believe the trend applies to Britain and other parts of Europe. Data from America also point to the earlier onset of puberty.

Scientists warn that such young girls are ill-equipped to cope with sexual development when they are still at primary school.
“We were very surprised that there had been such a change in a period of just 15 years,” said Anders Juul, head of the Department of Growth and Reproduction at the University hospital in Copenhagen, a world leader in the study of hormones and growth.
“If girls mature early, they run into teenage problems at an early age and they’re more prone to diseases later on. We should be worried about this regardless of what we think the underlying reasons might be. It’s a clear sign that something is affecting our children, whether it’s junk food, environmental chemicals or lack of physical activity.”
Hitting puberty early can mean longer exposure to oestrogen, which is a factor in breast cancer. There is also a greater risk of heart disease.
A number of artificially produced chemicals have been blamed for interfering with sexual development, notably bisphenol A, a plastic found in the lining of tin cans and babies’ feeding bottles.
Juul’s research team is now testing blood and urine samples from girls in the study to see if a direct link can be drawn between early sexual maturation and bisphenol A.
Another factor in puberty could be diet. Children are eating more than previous generations and growing bigger — and in many cases becoming obese.
There has been a steady lowering in the onset of puberty. In the 19th century, it was at about 15 for girls and 17 for boys.
The international standard for normal puberty in white girls was set in the 1960s at 12Å for the age when periods begin and at about 14 for boys when their voices break and their growth surges.
A more recent consensus in Britain has proved elusive. “Although we don’t have clear data here, there is evidence the same thing [as in Denmark] is happening for reasons that we don’t understand,” said Richard Sharpe, head of the Medical Research Council’s human reproductive sciences unit in Edinburgh.
“We don’t know if this is the result of better nutrition or environmental factors, but it does create social problems for girls who are already living in a sexualised society.”
Sharpe said boys had also been affected by the phenomenon. Choir schools have reported an increasing number of boys dropping out because their voices had broken at the age of 12 or 13.
Richard Stanhope, an expert in hormonal disorders in children who recently retired from Great Ormond Street hospital, said specialists in his field believed they were seeing more children going through early puberty.
“All the things we experience as teenagers are difficult enough to cope with, but when it happens at 10 or 11 it is much worse,” he said.
“These children are also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused because it is hard for some adults to understand and behave appropriately towards them.”
Girls who reach puberty early often find themselves teased at school. “I had to wear a bra at 9,” said one girl, who did not want to be named. “I used to pretend to be ill to get out of changing for PE.
“The worst part was men coming on to me as though I was an adult when actually I was 11.”
A study published in the journal Public Health Nutrition last Friday showed a link between high meat consumption and earlier puberty in girls.
Researchers at Brighton University found that 49% of girls who ate meat 12 times a week at the age of 7 had reached puberty by the age of 12 1/2, compared with 35% of those who ate meat four times a week or less.
by Lois Rogers From http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article7148975.ece

 

BPA, Chemical Used To Make Plastics, Found To Leach From Polycarbonate Drinking Bottles Into Humans

A new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers found that participants who drank for a week from polycarbonate bottles -- the popular, hard-plastic drinking bottles and baby bottles -- showed a two-thirds increase in their urine of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA). Exposure to BPA, used in the manufacture of polycarbonate and other plastics, has been shown to interfere with reproductive development in animals and has been linked with cardiovascular disease and diabetes in humans.

The study is the first to show that drinking from polycarbonate bottles increased the level of urinary BPA, and thus suggests that drinking containers made with BPA release the chemical into the liquid that people drink in sufficient amounts to increase the level of BPA excreted in human urine.
In addition to polycarbonate bottles, which are refillable and a popular container among students, campers and others and are also used as baby bottles, BPA is also found in dentistry composites and sealants and in the lining of aluminum food and beverage cans. (In bottles, polycarbonate can be identified by the recycling number 7.) Numerous studies have shown that it acts as an endocrine-disruptor in animals, including early onset of sexual maturation, altered development and tissue organization of the mammary gland and decreased sperm production in offspring. It may be most harmful in the stages of early development.
"We found that drinking cold liquids from polycarbonate bottles for just one week increased urinary BPA levels by more than two-thirds. If you heat those bottles, as is the case with baby bottles, we would expect the levels to be considerably higher. This would be of concern since infants may be particularly susceptible to BPA's endocrine-disrupting potential," said Karin B. Michels, associate professor of epidemiology at HSPH and Harvard Medical School and senior author of the study.
The researchers, led by first author Jenny Carwile, a doctoral student in the department of epidemiology at HSPH, and Michels, recruited Harvard College students for the study in April 2008. The 77 participants began the study with a seven-day "washout" phase in which they drank all cold beverages from stainless steel bottles in order to minimize BPA exposure. Participants provided urine samples during the washout period. They were then given two polycarbonate bottles and asked to drink all cold beverages from the bottles during the next week; urine samples were also provided during that time.
The results showed that the participants' urinary BPA concentrations increased 69% after drinking from the polycarbonate bottles. (The study authors noted that BPA concentrations in the college population were similar to those reported for the U.S. general population.) Previous studies had found that BPA could leach from polycarbonate bottles into their contents; this study is the first to show a corresponding increase in urinary BPA concentrations in humans.
One of the study's strengths, the authors note, is that the students drank from the bottles in a normal use setting. Additionally, the students did not wash their bottles in dishwashers nor put hot liquids in them; heating has been shown to increase the leaching of BPA from polycarbonate, so BPA levels might have been higher had students drunk hot liquids from the bottles.
Canada banned the use of BPA in polycarbonate baby bottles in 2008 and some polycarbonate bottle manufacturers have voluntarily eliminated BPA from their products. With increasing evidence of the potential harmful effects of BPA in humans, the authors believe further research is needed on the effect of BPA on infants and on reproductive disorders and on breast cancer in adults.
"This study is coming at an important time because many states are deciding whether to ban the use of BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups. While previous studies have demonstrated that BPA is linked to adverse health effects, this study fills in a missing piece of the puzzle—whether or not polycarbonate plastic bottles are an important contributor to the amount of BPA in the body," said Carwile.
The study was supported by the Harvard University Center for the Environment and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Biological Analysis Core, Department of Environmental Health, HSPH. Carwile was also supported by the Training Program in Environmental Epidemiology.
Editor's Note: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

From http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090521141208.htm

Skin is no barrier to BPA, study shows

Finding suggests handling store receipts could be significant source of internal exposure

Bisphenol A readily passes through skin, French scientists report. Best known as an estrogen-mimicking constituent of some plastics and resins, BPA is also found in a large share of cash register receipt paper in the United States and Europe, a trio of studies recently indicated. One of the three also showed that the powdery coating easily rubs off onto the hands.
“The new study is now unequivocal in showing that yes, BPA can go through human skin,” says Frederick vom Saal of the University of Missouri-Columbia.
It may also explain why a survey due to appear in an upcoming issue of Environmental Health Perspectives found that among nearly 400 pregnant Cincinnati-area women, the highest BPA concentrations were in cashiers. However, Joe M. Braun and his coauthors note, "these results should be interpreted cautiously since estimates from cashiers were based on 17 women."
The French work, posted online in advance of print in Chemosphere, was conducted at INRA, the National Institute for Agricultural Research in France. Its Toulouse-based team has been investigating excised but still living skin tissue as an alternative to live animals for safety tests of cosmetics and other chemicals.
Toxicologist Daniel Zalko and his coworkers collected pig ears from slaughterhouses within five minutes of an animal being killed. In less than two hours, the tissues were in the lab where researchers removed the skin, cut it into tiny disks and cultured each in a dish.
The scientists applied BPA at various concentrations to the dry outer surface of the skin. The lowest concentration used would have delivered a dose of BPA that is in the ballpark of what could rub off onto an equivalent area of skin from handling receipt paper, Zalko says.
After three days more than half of the BPA had diffused through the skin and into the growth medium. In a living animal, Zalko says, the diffused chemical would likely be circulating in blood throughout the body.
Enzymes active in the skin transformed the majority of the BPA into metabolites known as conjugates, which have chemical “add-ons” to the main BPA molecule. BPA principally is converted into the compounds BPA glucuronide and BPA sulfate. Though such transformations are often assumed to render a chemical nontoxic, “that would be a false assumption,” Zalko says, “because any compound that has been conjugated can be deconjugated.”
To validate the value of pig skin as a human surrogate, Zalko’s group also ran the BPA experiments using tiny samples of healthy human skin that had been removed from the abdomens of roughly 40-year-old women during various surgical procedures. Again, almost half of the BPA applied passed completely through the skin. And Zalko cautions that this pass-through rate might be conservative since the cultured human skin samples weren’t as fresh — and therefore porous — as the pig ears had been.
Moreover, far less of the BPA exiting the human skin was conjugated compared with pig skin, and what had been transformed was less likely to be in the glucuronide form.
The role of metabolites in BPA’s potential toxicity is complicated, vom Saal says, because the body can — and regularly does — conjugate and deconjugate compounds. “It’s well known,” for instance, “that the body is full of desulfating enzymes, which play a role regulating estrogen levels during pregnancy.”
These new data reinforce concerns about store receipts, he adds, “because we know from many thermal papers that receipts can contain a heck of a lot of BPA.” And that BPA is about as likely to rub off receipt paper as a coating of talcum powder would be, he says.
Vom Saal’s team is just launching a study with volunteers to measure not only how much BPA people get on their hands from holding thermal receipt paper, but also whether the compound goes on to show up in their blood and urine. Those data could be available by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, the leading producer of thermal-receipt stock in the United States — Appleton Papers, which claims to have been BPA-free since 2006 — is looking to help consumers identify its receipts. “Consumers have made it clear that they want an easy way to distinguish Appleton’s receipt paper from our competitors’ paper, which all contain BPA,” says company vice president Kent Willetts. “We are preparing to launch a BPA-free receipt paper that can be quickly and easily distinguished from all others. We will rush that product to market and have it in retailers’ hands in time for the holiday shopping season.”
by Janet Raloff @ http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/64972/title/Skin_is_no_barrier_to_BPA,_study_shows

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The Perils of Plastic

The Perils of Plastic

Chemicals in plastics and other products seem harmless, but mounting evidence links them to health problems — and Washington lacks the power to protect its citizens…

By Bryan Walsh 

Young children are subjected to plastics in their every day life such as eating utensils, plates, bowls that might contain dangerous toxins.

Photograph by James Day for TIME

On the first Earth Day, celebrated 40 years ago this month, the U.S. was a poisoned nation. Dense air pollution blanketed cities like Los Angeles, where smog alerts were a fact of life. Dangerous pesticides like DDT were still in use, and water pollution was rampant — symbolized by raging fires on Cleveland's Cuyahoga River…. But the green movement that was energized by Earth Day — and the landmark federal actions that followed it — changed much of that. Today air pollution is down significantly in most urban areas, the water is cleaner, and even the Cuyahoga is home to fish again. Though climate change looms as a long-term threat, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day will see a much cleaner country.
But if the land is healing, Americans may be sickening. Since World War II, production of industrial chemicals has risen rapidly, and the U.S. generates or imports some 42 billion lb. (19 billion kg) of them per day, leaving Americans awash in a sea of synthetics. These aren't the sorts of chemicals that come to mind when we picture pollution — huge plants spilling contaminated wastewater into rivers. Rather, they're the molecules that make good on the old "better living through chemistry" promise, appearing in items like unbreakable baby bottles and big-screen TVs.
Those chemicals have a habit of finding their way out of everyday products and into the environment — and ultimately into living organisms. A recent biomonitoring survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found traces of 212 environmental chemicals in Americans — including toxic metals like arsenic and cadmium, pesticides, flame retardants and even perchlorate, an ingredient in rocket fuel. "It's not the environment that's contaminated so much," says Dr. Bruce Lanphear, director of the Cincinnati Children's Environmental Health Center. "It's us." (See pictures of the world's most polluted places.)
As scientists get better at detecting the chemicals in our bodies, they're discovering that even tiny quantities of toxins can have a potentially serious impact on our health — and our children's future. Chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates — key ingredients in modern plastics — may disrupt the delicate endocrine system, leading to developmental problems.
A host of modern ills that have been rising unchecked for a generation — obesity, diabetes, autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder — could have chemical connections. "We don't give environmental exposure the attention it deserves," says Dr. Philip Landrigan, director of the Children's Environmental Health Center at New York City's Mount Sinai Medical Center. "But there's an emerging understanding that kids are uniquely susceptible to environmental hazards." (See the top 10 household toxins.)
If scientists were slow to arrive at that conclusion, Washington has been even slower. The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), the 34-year-old vehicle for federal chemical regulation, has generally been a failure. The burden of proving chemicals dangerous falls almost entirely on the government, while industry confidentiality privileges built into the TSCA deny citizens and federal regulators critical information about how substances are made and what their effects are. In the years since the TSCA became law, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been able to issue restrictions on only a handful of chemicals and has lacked the power to ban even a dangerous carcinogen like asbestos.
But change is coming. The Obama Administration is taking a closer look at chemicals, with the EPA late last month launching a new investigation into BPA. More important, Congress may finally be ready to act. New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg is expected to draft legislation soon that would give the TSCA the teeth it needs. "It's obvious that the system doesn't work," says Lautenberg. "We can't permit this assault on our children's health — and our own health — to continue." (See pictures of the effects of global warming.)

The Low-Dose Threat

His name was Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, known to his contemporaries as Paracelsus and to students of science as the "father of toxicology." The 16th century Swiss physician pioneered the use of chemicals in medicine. His dictum "The dose makes the poison" — that even toxic substances can be safe as long as the amount remains below a certain threshold — is still a bedrock principle for modern toxicologists.
That helps explain why industrial chemicals never received the stricter regulatory oversight that drugs and pesticides did. Even if the chemicals used to help make a plastic bottle could infiltrate the human body, the thinking went, surely the dose would be too low to do any harm. But as biomonitoring improved — we can now detect human exposure levels as small as one part per trillion, or about one-twentieth of a drop of water in an Olympic-size swimming pool — scientists realized that people were carrying far more chemicals than we'd thought.
At the same time, scientists learned that some toxins could harm at extremely low levels; the limit considered safe for lead, which can directly reduce IQ, has been lowered from 60 micrograms per deciliter of blood in 1970 to 10 micrograms today. Some chemicals like BPA may have strange effects even at very low doses. Invented in 1891, BPA has been used since the 1940s to harden polycarbonate plastics and make epoxy resin, used in the lining of food and beverage containers, among other products. Polycarbonates can be identified by the recycling number 7 on the bottom of some plastics containing it. Other plastic ingredients — including potentially dangerous ones — are also indicated by the recycling number, known as the resin identification code.
BPA does its job well, and today some 6 billion lb. (2.7 billion kg) of the chemical are produced globally each year. The problem is, BPA is also a synthetic estrogen, and plastics with BPA can break down, especially when they're washed, heated or stressed, allowing the chemical to leach into food and water and then enter the human body. That happens to nearly all of us; the CDC has found BPA in the urine of 93% of surveyed Americans over the age of 6. If you don't have BPA in your body, you're not living in the modern world. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2009.)
The levels observed are considered well below the federal safety threshold of 50 micrograms per kg of body weight per day. But that recommendation was made 22 years ago, and in the time since, scientists have learned more about the effects of even a bit of BPA. In 1998, Patricia Hunt, a geneticist at Washington State University, found that female mice dosed with BPA had serious reproductive problems, including defective eggs. More recently, she published a study showing that the offspring of mice exposed to BPA while pregnant can end up with corrupted eggs, a situation that leads to trouble for their offspring. "That's a powerful effect," says Hunt. "You disrupt three generations with one exposure."
As a synthetic estrogen, BPA can mimic hormones, those powerful chemicals, like testosterone and adrenaline, that run the body. Tiny amounts of hormones produce immense biological and behavioral changes, so it stands to reason that a chemical that mirrors a hormone might do the same, especially if a human being were exposed to it during critical periods of development, like the first trimester of gestation. (Children are particularly vulnerable to chemical exposure, not just because their smaller bodies are developing rapidly but also because they eat and drink more relative to their body weight than adults.) That's exactly what dozens of scientists have found in animal studies, linking fetal BPA exposure in rodents to everything from mammary cancer to male genital defects and even neurobehavioral problems.
Nor is BPA the only industrial chemical in common use that may mess with the endocrine system. Phthalates — a class of chemicals used to soften polyvinyl chloride plastics, found in products ranging from shower curtains to cosmetics to intravenous-fluid bags — have been shown to disrupt hormones in animals and have been linked to reduced sperm counts and other marks of feminization in male rodents. Ditto for a class of long-lived chemical fire retardants known as polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), used in electronics, polyurethane foam and other plastics, though they're being phased out. (PBDEs can remain in the body for years. BPA and phthalates are excreted within a day or so, but their ubiquity means we're exposing ourselves anew almost daily.)
While there are fewer studies of endocrine disrupters in humans than in animals, the ones that have been conducted have begun to show worrying associations. Higher levels of phthalates and other endocrine disrupters have been linked to earlier breast development in girls — a possible risk factor for breast cancer — and endocrine disrupters are a suspect in the rise in hypospadias, a correctable deformity of the urethra in boys. A 2008 study by Shanna Swan, director of the Center for Reproductive Epidemiology at the University of Rochester, found that boys born to women with high phthalate exposure during pregnancy were more likely to have genital abnormalities like undescended testicles and smaller penises than those born to women who had lower exposure. "I worry what will happen to these children as adults, whether they'll have reproductive problems," says Swan. "We're trying to piece that question together."
The science around endocrine disrupters is far from settled. Studies like Swan's show a correlation between phthalate exposure and developmental defects, but that doesn't mean the chemicals are causing the problems. Industry defenders point out that human exposure to BPA and phthalates is still well below safety levels set by the government and that health agencies around the world say the chemicals are safe for humans. And some peer-reviewed studies fail to show a positive connection between endocrine disrupters like BPA and health defects. "I think the research [on BPA] has been overhyped," says Richard Sharpe, an investigator at the Centre for Reproductive Biology at the Queen's Medical Research Institute in Edinburgh. "If you restrict the question to its estrogenic effects, I just don't see them."
The scientific consensus, however, has been moving away from the idea that BPA is completely safe. When researchers began raising alarms about BPA in the late 1990s, they were in the minority. Under the Bush Administration, the FDA reviewed the chemical and ruled it safe. But that report was criticized by the agency's own science-review board for relying almost exclusively on industry-funded studies. In 2008 Canada deemed infant exposure to BPA potentially unsafe and banned the sale of baby bottles that use the chemical — a step later taken by a number of American states and major retailers, including Walmart. Though European regulators declared BPA safe in a 2008 assessment, last month Denmark enacted a ban on BPA in baby bottles.
In 2009 the International Endocrine Society released a statement declaring that endocrine disrupters were a significant concern for public health and called for regulation to reduce human exposure. And even the FDA has changed its tune somewhat: in January the agency expressed "some concern" over BPA as the Obama Administration launched a $30 million study of the chemical. "Especially given that children in the early stages of development are exposed to BPA, the data and the research deserve a closer look," Dr. Josh Sharfstein, the FDA's principal deputy commissioner, told reporters at the time.
The woman in charge of that closer look is Linda Birnbaum, head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Toxicology Program. A scientist who has spent decades in government service, Birnbaum isn't quite ready to give up on Paracelsus' axiom, but she knows that toxicology has to catch up with the real world.
Scientists must realize that the body doesn't encounter a single chemical in isolation — though that's how tests are done — but a number of chemicals in combination, which might interact in unpredictable ways. The dose may still make the poison, but we'll never know unless we test the chemical soup we actually experience in the world — unless, that is, we find the environmentally relevant dose. "There's been a tendency to ask the old questions in the old way," says Birnbaum. "But if it's dark and you only look for your keys under the lamppost and they're not right there, you'll never find them."
Good science means widening that search, asking not only which chemicals may play a role in illnesses — essentially, where else the keys might be — but also how those chemicals do their damage. Certain substances — including BPA and some phthalates — seem to be able to switch in vitro cells from becoming connective tissue to becoming fat cells, and a 2009 study from Belgium found that children exposed to higher levels of toxic chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) before birth were fatter than those who had lower exposure. Even autism, which remains a mystery, may have environmental triggers. (Vaccines have been repeatedly exonerated in autism debates, a conclusion that's accepted even by scientists who see the possibility of other environmental risk factors in the condition.)
And a recent study by Swan found that women who had higher levels of phthalate exposure during pregnancy were more likely to have children with behavioral problems. None of this is proof, but all of it is worrisome. "We need to know where these chemicals are and what they're doing to us," says New York Representative Louise Slaughter, author of legislation that would establish a new research program focused on endocrine disrupters. "We shouldn't be in the dark."

Failure to Protect

If you want to market a new drug, you need to convince the FDA — in multiple tests, over the course of years — that it won't cause serious harm. If you want to sell a new pesticide, you need to prove the same thing. The burden of proof is on manufacturers to make the grade, and government regulators are the final judge.
But if you want to market a new chemical for use in a product — even one that will come into contact with children or pregnant women — it's up to the EPA to prove that it's unsafe, using whatever data are provided by the chemical company, with little power to ask for more. And if it's one of the 62,000 chemicals that were already in use when the TSCA went into effect in 1976 — a category that includes BPA — chances are it was never really tested by the government at all. "Chemicals are deemed safe until the EPA can prove that they are dangerous," says Richard Wiles, executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. "It's completely backward."
The result is a catch-22 for regulators and an information vacuum for consumers. Chemical companies don't have to develop toxicity data or submit it to the EPA for an existing product unless the agency finds that it will pose an unreasonable risk to human health or the environment — which is difficult to do if the agency doesn't have much data in the first place. The EPA can issue rules requiring testing, but that can take years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars — which helps explain why the agency has required testing for only about 200 of the 83,000 chemicals in the TSCA inventory and has issued restrictions on just five. (Companies have voluntarily agreed to provide the EPA with some data about the most common chemicals, but there's no guarantee that the data will be timely or complete.)
The TSCA also gives the industry wide latitude to claim confidentiality on products, so nearly 17,000 of those chemicals are virtual trade secrets. It's no surprise that the Government Accountability Office has reported that the TSCA is in desperate need of reform. "The only fix is to change this law or modernize it," says EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.
The good news is that more than 30 years after the TSCA was signed, the pieces may finally be in place for much needed retooling. Jackson has made chemical-safety reform one of the top priorities of her energetic administration, and on Capitol Hill, the tenacious, 86-year-old Lautenberg and Illinois Representative Bobby Rush are pushing to craft an update to the TSCA and may have legislation ready to introduce after the Easter break. Even the chemical industry has admitted a need to reform the TSCA and is ready to negotiate. "Science has advanced a long way since the TSCA was adopted, and we recognize that more can be done to create a system that people have comfort and confidence in," says Cal Dooley, president and CEO of the American Chemistry Council.
But agreeing on the need for reform is a long way from agreeing on how to reform. One model might be the safety laws recently put into place by the European Union, called REACH, which shift the burden of proof to industry, requiring chemical companies to prove that their products don't harm human health or the environment and to obtain special authorization for any chemicals of very high concern. The American chemical industry has reservations about a REACH-style program in the U.S., citing the cost of additional regulations, but such a change could represent a long-overdue safety step. "It would make a major difference if we could do for chemicals what we do now for pesticides and drugs," says Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
Reform alone, though, won't defuse the basic debate over how much of an impact chemicals really are having on human health — and when protective measures may go too far. Nearly everything we buy, sell and use depends on chemicals, and the industry employs 803,000 Americans. Replacing the keystone ingredients of modern life would be challenging, not to mention costly. And smarter regulation won't change the fact that the science on chemicals and health — especially for complex endocrine disrupters — will never be clear-cut, no matter how many studies each side carries out.
"You can ban BPA all you want, but if there are no better materials, you'll just move to the next case," says Joel Tickner, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts' School of Health and Environment. "We need solutions that will be win-win."
One such solution may lie in the new field of green chemistry, in which chemicals are designed in a way that minimizes hazardous risk from the start. Less a practice than a philosophy, green chemistry seeks to sidestep the debate altogether by engineering products not only to be nontoxic but also to leave no dangerous residue and to use less energy.
The EPA's Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards recognize achievements in sustainable design like a new biocatalytic process for cosmetics that uses no toxic solvents, and at last month's annual meeting of the American Chemical Society, more than 1,600 of 12,000 presentations were dedicated to sustainability. "There'll be a day in the future when all chemistry is going to be green," says John Warner, director of the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry. "In that world we'd never need regulation again."
But even Warner admits that such a day is far off. Meanwhile, we'll need to decide just how cautious we want to be as a society. "Science isn't just about data," says the NIEHS's Birnbaum. "It's about the interpretation of data." That interpretation, ultimately, won't be up to scientists. It will be up to us. The lesson of Earth Day, 40 years on, is that smart policy — fired by popular will — can make a difference that we can see. The question is whether we'll bring the same passion to environmental threats that are invisible but could be just as dangerous.

From - http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1976909_1976908,00.html

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