Inside Prevention

Calif. governor proposes reforms to landmark toxics law (Environment & Energy Publishing, 5/8/13)

Calif. Governor Jerry Brown has proposed significant reforms to Prop. 65, the state's Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act. We generally support the Brown administration's efforts—particularly when it comes to warning labels. Brown's proposal would make warning labels much more specific, telling people about particular chemicals while providing tips on how to minimize exposure.

We also support efforts to limit frivolous lawsuits that don’t make California’s products any safer. While there may be some unscrupulous attorneys only looking to make a quick buck using Prop 65, it is important to note that many Prop. 65 lawsuits have propelled momentum on regulations of toxic substances including caramel coloring and lead.

Despite our support of these items, we are concerned about one portion of the proposed reform. Brown is considering lowering the threshold levels of chemicals that would trigger warning labels. Though his newly proposed no-observed-adverse-effect levels may make sense for some chemicals, endocrine disruptors like BPA and phthalates require a more nuanced approach since they can be harmful (especially to pregnant women, infants and children) at extremely low doses. In the end, any provisions should maintain the integrity of Prop. 65 and avoid rendering it toothless regulation.

Gretchen Lee Salter, the Breast Cancer Fund's senior policy manager, was recently interviewed for an E&E article about the proposed changes: 

The law has "really been successful taking toxic chemicals out of consumer products," said Gretchen Lee Salter, senior program and policy manager at the Breast Cancer Fund. Companies have reformulated items rather than disclosing chemicals, she said, because landing on the state's Proposition 65 list is like the "Scarlet Letter."

"We just want to make sure that any reforms that may happen, that we don't lose that aspect of Proposition 65," Salter said.

And as other states enact toxics policies and create lists of problematic chemicals, they often look to the Golden State's list as authoritative, she said, adding "we want to make sure that California maintains its leadership."

Salter also said she was concerned that the process of changing the law could open the door for the chemical industry lobby to advance the rewrites it wants.

We’ll continue to work with the administration to ensure Prop 65  protects public health in the way it always has.

The E&E story is not available online, but you can read more about Gov. Brown's proposed changes in the San Francisco Chronicle and the LA Times.

American Chemistry Council blocks state scientists from doing their jobs

Just as BPA disrupts our hormones, Big Chem is doing everything it can to disrupt the democratic process, using its money, power and influence to block government action that would protect pregnant women and children.

On Friday, shortly after California’s Environmental Protection Agency had announced its decision to add BPA to its list of Prop 65 reproductive toxicants, a judge ordered BPA off the same list.  The judge granted an injunction in the American Chemistry Council's case against California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The chemical industry is trying to argue in court that BPA does not cause birth defects.

Prop 65 requires the governor of California to publish, at least annually, a list of chemicals known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity and, in some instances, requires labeling of products containing those chemicals.

If BPA is safe, as the chemical industry asserts, why would the FDA have banned it from baby bottles and children’s drinking cups in 2012? Why would 12 states have introduced legislation either banning or requiring the labeling of BPA in food packaging? Why would France have banned it all together from food packaging? Why would countless studies have demonstrated a clear link between BPA and a long list of health problems including infertility and breast cancer?

Stay tuned. We will be following this issue as it progresses. In the meantime, please share your thoughts and comments below!

 

Will Your Canned Soup Carry a Warning Label? (Rodale, 4/12/2013)

A Rodale article about California’s declaration that BPA would be added to the state’s list of Prop 65 chemicals quotes our policy manager, Gretchen Lee Salter:

“The Prop 65 listing is yet another indictment of this toxic chemical that industry continues to argue is safe, despite waves of peer-reviewed scientific studies finding that BPA harms reproduction and is linked to breast cancer," says Gretchen Lee Salter, policy manager at the Breast Cancer Fund. "And the listing is happening the same week that the French government began warning pregnant women to avoid BPA because fetal exposure has been linked to later-life breast cancer. This is a seriously toxic chemical that none of us should be exposed to." Read the full article here.

Proposition 65 requires the governor of California to publish, at least annually, a list of chemicals known to the state to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity. The law also requires labeling of  products that contain high levels of these chemicals, but because BPA can exert negative effects at extremely low levels, environmental health advocates and state officials are still hashing out acceptable levels for labeling.  For more information on the health effects of BPA, check out our recently updated State of the Evidence on BPA.

Phthalates and BPA make an unexpected appearance

A new dietary intervention study suggests that an individual may not be able to avoid food packaging chemicals like phthalates (plastic softeners) and BPA (found in canned foods and older hard plastic containers) by cutting out canned and plastic-wrapped foods because these chemicals can—and do—enter the food during processing.

Researchers from the University of Washington replicated the 2011 Breast Cancer Fund and Silent Spring Institute dietary intervention study and found DEHP (a phthalate used in food packaging) levels increased 24-fold during the intervention.

The researchers were puzzled by this finding—our study found phthalate and BPA levels declined during the intervention diet—so they followed up by testing spices and dairy used in the intervention diet. They found high levels of DEHP in spices like coriander, cinnamon and cayenne pepper, as well as in dairy products.

The researchers also found modest increases in BPA during the intervention. This finding may be due to a study population who already ate mostly fresh foods—in fact, only three of the 10 families who participated indicated eating canned foods.

These findings underscore the need for federal reform of food contact laws that can ensure chemicals linked to hormone disruption don't end up in our food supply. The FDA has the authority to regulate chemicals our food touches at all points in the process from field to table: from the type of plastic tubing used in milking equipment, to the containers spices are held in before being divvied up in store-shelf sizes, to the plastic wrap on supermarket cheese.

Our role is to see that the FDA actually uses this power to protect our health.

For more on this study, check out Fast Company (You’re Eating Toxic Chemicals, Even If You Eat Organic And Avoid Plastic) and the NRDC blog (What's for lunch? Likely a few hormone-disrupting chemicals - phthalates and BPA).

U.S. report urges deeper look into breast cancer's environmental links (Center for Public Integrity, 2/12/2013)

More coverage of this week's major report release, this from the Center for Public Integrity:

Compiled by the congressionally mandated Interagency Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Coordinating Committee, the report notes that most cases of breast cancer “occur in people with no family history,” suggesting that “environmental factors — broadly defined — must play a major role in the etiology of the disease.”

Yet only a fraction of federal research funding has gone toward examining links between breast cancer and ubiquitous chemicals such as the plastic hardening agent bisphenol A; the herbicide atrazine; and dioxin, a byproduct of plastics manufacturing and burning, says the report, prepared for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and released today.

“Prevention needs to be as important as other investments that are made in screening, treatment and access to care,” Jeanne Rizzo, co-chair of the committee and president of the San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund, said in an interview. (Read complete article.)

Eat like a Mennonite (New York Times, 1/18/2013)

What does it take for a modern American family to lower its BPA levels? Author Florence Williams offers a peek into her stint in the nearly-plastic-free world in an opinion piece for the New York Times:

On the second day of my chemical-detox diet, I was very hungry. I’d been eating like a rabbit, all carrots and greens that I’d gathered, barehanded, from the baskets of the farmer’s market, no gloves or plastic bags allowed. I cooked up some quinoa that I bought packaged in paper from the supermarket sometimes known as Whole Paycheck. I was effectively a vegan because I couldn’t find meat or cheese that wasn’t wrapped in plastic, and I didn’t have access to accommodating livestock.

My 7-year-old daughter and I were participating in a pilot study conducted in 2011 by the Silent Spring Institute and the Breast Cancer Fund (a follow-up study was published later that year in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives). We had urinated into some glass containers a few weeks earlier, back when we were "normal" Americans, and now we were spending three days trying to reduce our exposure to plastics before supplying our urine again.

As Williams notes, the "normal" phase of the study, which allowed for painted toenails and canned beans, was more fun. Yet it's possible to create modern conveniences that don't leave toxic traces in their human consumers.

Says Williams, "It's why we need the government to require testing of commercial chemicals for hormonal effects, and to regulate them in a meaningful way. And it's why we need manufacturers to design products with safer substances in the first place." (Read complete article.)

Now undeniable: Breast cancer that comes with the job (Huffington Post, 11/26/2012)

Our own Jeanne Rizzo published her thoughts about the recent Canadian factory worker study on Huffington Post yesterday. Now we have evidence that women who are exposed to hormone-disrupting chemicals in food canning and plastics factories have a sharply higher risk of breast cancer—so what will we do about it? And who will act on behalf of these women?

Unfortunately for these women workers and for all of us (for we too are exposed to some of these chemicals on a daily basis), many industry and government leaders refuse to act based on biological plausibility. Instead, they prefer plausible deniability, saying we need more and more and more evidence—incontrovertible truth, in fact—before we take action. (Read complete article.)

Related articles

Can certain jobs cause breast cancer? A new study suggests yes (The Daily Beast, 11/21/2012)

Jeanne Rizzo: Now Undeniable: Breast Cancer That Comes With the Job

Study spotlights high breast cancer risk for plastics workers (Center for Public Integrity, 11/19/2012)

Can certain jobs cause breast cancer? A new study suggests yes (The Daily Beast, 11/21/2012)

Florence Williams, author of the acclaimed book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, spoke with Breast Cancer Fund President and CEO Jeanne Rizzo for a piece on The Daily Beast describing a new Canadian study.

The study authors found a higher risk of premenopausal breast cancer among women working in factories that make canned foods and plastic parts for automobiles:

Both the automotive and canning industries are known to use chemicals that affect hormone systems in lab animals, such as BPA, phthalates, and flame-retardants. Phthalates, which are used to make plastic malleable for molding car interiors, have been associated with lower sperm counts in men. BPA, used in the lining of food cans, has been banned from some products in Canada.

“The U.S. has not conducted this kind of workplace study,” said Jeanne Rizzo, president of the Breast Cancer Fund, a California-based nonprofit. “Federal agencies should immediately look into similar occupations in this country and take this seriously.” (Read complete article.)

Study spotlights high breast cancer risk for plastics workers (Center for Public Integrity, 11/19/2012)

Researchers have found a fivefold increase in breast cancer risk for pre-menopausal women who worked in factories that make food cans or plastic automotive parts, as compared to a control group from the same industrial community. In the course of their work, these women were likely exposed to carcinogens and hormone-disrupting chemicals like BPA, phthalates and flame retardants.

The study was published today in the journal Environmental Health; the Center for Public Integrity interviewed Breast Cancer Fund President and CEO Jeanne Rizzo for an in-depth story also out today: 

“These workplace chemicals are now present in our air, water, food and consumer products,” said one of the two principal investigators, James Brophy, an adjunct faculty member at the University of Windsor and a former occupational health clinic director. “If we fail to take heed then we are doing so at our own peril.”

Jeanne Rizzo, president of the Breast Cancer Fund, a San Francisco-based group that has pressed for more research into environmental causes of a disease that claimed nearly 40,000 lives in the United States last year, called the Windsor study “a very powerful piece of work. The piece that’s really been missing for female breast cancer is occupation.” (Read complete article.)

This is big news—and a call to action for industries and governments to do more to protect workers from toxic chemicals.

FDA bans BPA in baby bottles -- but what does it really mean?

Too little, too late is how Janet Nudelman, the Breast Cancer Fund's Director of Program and Policy, characterizes the FDA's decision to ban BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups. The ban, announced today, will have little impact on the market, which has already turned away from BPA in children's products.

[G]iven that Canada, the European Union, China, and at least five other countries as well as 11 U.S. states have prohibited the use of BPA in children’s products, that every major baby bottle manufacturer has already stopped using the chemical, and that BPA is also found in canned food linings, some infant formula containers and other food packaging, this action is too little, too late.

...

Now the FDA needs to catch up. The FDA needs to take decisive action to ensure that all of us are protected from this toxic chemical.

Read Janet's complete statement and learn more about BPA and breast cancer.