BPA is still dangerous, says the Daily Mail

I remember during one of the last BPA witch hunts - when the British media picked up on the US hysteria about polycarbonate baby bottles (a million American moms can't be wrong) - the BBC news ran a long (and so in depth?) report about the harm this devil plastic could do in food contact applications. The report was illustrated by "typical" polycarbonate products, including compact discs - long time since I've eaten one of those or used it as a plate on which to store food. And it included an impressive sequence of milk bottles being blow moulded - in HDPE of course, not a lot of BPA or PC there.

The real problem is the inability of general news reporters to get behind the concept of "chemicals" being an all-embracing term for industrial substances that are fundamentally harmful. The current target is the use of "industrial grade" silicone in breast implants. I may have missed the supporting evidence - and if so I apologise for the misconception - but it seems that while using a non-medically-approved material in these devices goes against common sense, no-one has suffered any direct harm from contact with the silicone. One woman who died of cancer had PIP silicone implants but the two facts have not been linked conclusively; PIP is said to have sold 300,000 implants worldwide (so presumably some 150,000 women have them and the potential risk to health is at odds of 150,000 to 1); and the charge of manslaughter against PIP's founder tycoon (sorry, Daily Mail word, as was his description as a breast implant "butcher") Jean-Claude Mas seems to have expeditiously been reduced to one of "unintentional harming".

It is perhaps too much to expect newspaper and television reporters to have a working knowledge of industrial chemistry, but in my time in general news reporting we had a filter above us of sub-editors whose job, while not itself being one of knowing all things, included the ability to recognise the potential for failing to understand the niceties and ask sufficient questions to satisfy themselves that the paper was justified in what it was reporting and how it was reporting it.

Given the importance of all aspects of chemistry to our lives, I think an effort should be made by the august bodies of men in suits who represent the various groupings of chemical converting industries to join forces and put in place a readily accessible source of technical information without the partiality which is so often attached to the backgrounders and defensive statements from the individual organisations when they find themselves under attack.

- 17 February 2012 - Ken Grace