Bottled Up Frustration

If you sensed a little hostility toward the FDA in my last (very brief) post, you’re right. It’s mainly because I have no faith in the agency to determine what is safe for my family and me. And since that is its function, I find it frustrating. I first started paying attention to this when my sister was preparing for her first child and kept talking about something called BPA. Since then, I — and many other mothers — have become very familiar with BPA (bisphenol A) and the “controversy” surrounding it. I put that in quotes because almost everyone but the FDA and industry-funded scientists are in agreement: exposure to BPA, which is essentially a synthetic version of the hormone estrogen, increases the risk of cancer, infertility, heart disease and impairs brain function. (I won’t get into all the details because there are many other places you can read about BPA, like this fantastic article from Fast Company.) That mock controversy is exactly the problem with the FDA. To quote a stat from David Case’s Fast Company article:

Of the more than 100 independently funded experiments on BPA, about 90% have found evidence of adverse health effects at levels similar to human exposure. On the other hand, every single industry-funded study ever conducted — 14 in all — has found no such effects.

Guess which studies the FDA relied upon when it announced that it was perfectly acceptable for manufacturers to continue adding BPA to plastic baby bottles, pacifiers, sippy cups, teethers and a variety of other baby products (not to mention water bottles, the lining of many canned foods, including baby formula, and a slew of other products)? Oh, and did I mention that babies face the highest risks from BPA exposure?

To bring the story up to date, after local and state governments and individual stores began implementing bans on the sale of products containing BPA, and after numerous requests from advocacy groups and congress members for reconsideration, and condemnation of the FDA’s review from outside scientists and the appointment of a new FDA commissioner under President Obama, the FDA has finally decided to reconsider the risks of BPA. In the meantime, it’s still being added to all those plastic products on store shelves.

Anyway, this is old news. I bring it up for 3 reasons. First, it is information that every mother — and person — should know and it does not receive the media coverage it deserves. Second, the FDA has long-denied any industry-favoritism in its reviews. Given the science on BPA, that just says to me that the FDA has no intentions of changing its ways. Then last week the FDA admitted for the first time that an FDA commissioner (Bush-appointee Andrew von Eschenbach) caved to industry and congressional pressure to approve a medical device known to be unsafe (Menaflex, used on injured knees). I hoped — but didn’t really expect — that the admission signaled a change in direction under newly-appointed Commissioner Margaret Hamburg. But an NPR interview with Hamburg on Monday suggested to me that my expectations — not my hopes — were on target. In fairness, Hamburg didn’t say anything truly horrifying. But the overall sense I got was that the FDA is trying to improve its PR, not its protocols.

Thirdly, something Hamburg said caught my attention. To paraphrase, she said that N.J. Senators Robert Menendez and Frank R. Lautenberg and Representatives Frank Pallone Jr. and Steven R. Rothman, who the FDA says applied “extreme” and “unusual” pressure to get Menaflex approved (after receiving campaign contributions from its manufacturer, of course), were only doing their job. Hamburg seemed to shrug off this behavior: a constituent, ReGen Biologics, asked its congressmen to advocate for approval with the FDA, and they obliged. They are representatives after all. The congressmen offered the same explanation to the N.Y. Times when asked about their conduct:

All four members of Congress . . . said they were merely doing their jobs by trying to help a constituent company.

ReGen had the same to say for itself:

“We did what people do all the time in Washington: we went to our congressmen, we went to our senators,” [ReGen Chairman and CEO Gerald E.] Bisbee [Jr.] said.

Did I miss a memo or something? Am I supposed to write to my congressperson on a daily basis and ask them to lobby the FDA to approve only safe products?! See, I made the apparently ridiculous assumption that congresspeople know (and, I suppose, care) that their many human constituents would like them to lobby for things that keep them safe and healthy and to lobby against things that are unsafe and unhealthy. Accordingly, I assumed (falsely) that when one single constituent asks those same congresspeople to advocate for approval of an unsafe medical device, they will not leap out of their cushy chairs and do it! Silly me.

All of this brings me to a topic I’ve been thinking about ever since the U.S. Supreme Court called for re-arguments in Citizens United v. FEC. That is, why do we treat corporations like individuals again? The Citizens United case has nothing to do with BPA or the FDA, but its issues stem from the fact that U.S. law treats corporations just like individual citizens. And apparently this also plays a role in the FDA’s ineptitude. I know I read about this in law school. And, to be honest, I vaguely recall thinking that the reasoning behind granting individual rights to corporations seemed logical. But more and more it seems that corporations are being granted über-citizen status to the detriment of human citizens. And that can’t be what was intended. So has the political environment degraded to the point of undermining the original meaning or have corporations really bought enough lawmakers to sway all law in their favor? Or am I just missing something? I’m going to find out and get back to you.

In the meantime, see if your baby’s products are BPA-free using the Zrecs Guide; and shop for BPA-free products here.

The Bottled Up Frustration by MushBrain, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at mushbrain.net.