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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next >> The plastics industry strongly defended its products.
"BPA has been extensively studied for its potential to cause cancer, including lifetime studies in rats and mice," said Steven Hentges, executive director of the Polycarbonate Business Unit at the American Plastics Council, which represents the industry.
He added that governments around the world have also commissioned their own studies on BPA, "and, in every case, have concluded that BPA is not likely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans."
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Hentges said the study also has serious flaws.
"First of all, it's an in vitro study," he said. "You can't extrapolate from a cell culture and say much of anything about breast cancer." And, he said, tests conducted recently by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found average levels of BPA in human urine to be infinitesimally small -- about one part per billion.
Widlanski agreed that short-term, in vitro studies can never fully explain human disease. He also agreed that urine and blood concentrations of BPA metabolites in humans are much, much smaller than exposures used in this study.
"Unfortunately, we simply can't mimic long-term exposure to bisphenol A," he said, since it's unethical to give human test volunteers any chemical with an unproven safety record, especially over the long term.
"So, we have to use a larger concentration to mimic the effects of long-term exposure," he said. "No one knows if that's a valid way to do that or not." Animal studies are a logical next step, he said, but they can never fully replicate potential effects in humans.
"The real crux of the matter is that we are surrounded in our environment by chemicals that are pseudo-estrogenic, not just BPA," Widlanski added. "It's the cumulative effect of all of these compounds together that one needs to worry about."
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