BPA Killed My Horse

So, good news, right? The FDA banned bisphenol A, or BPA, from baby bottles and sippy cups. Yeah!

But wait, read the details. There's a long article in the New York Times, and a nice concise one by the AP.

Here's what really happened. Consumers got up in arms, manufacturers voluntarily stopped using it, the chemical manufacturers asked the FDA to ban it AFTER "determining that all manufacturers of bottles and sippy cups had already abandoned BPA due to concerns about its health effects", and THEN the FDA acted - simply codifying "what the industry was already doing based on the preference of consumers".

Frankly, this is a totally disingenuous action. The chemical industry gets to bat its eyelashes and say oh yes, we were behind the ban and reap all kinds of good publicity for its selfless rejection of a chemical that the National Toxicology Program has "some concern" about.

And banning something that manufacturers had already stopped using is kind of like beating that poor dead horse.

Canada declared BPA a toxic substance nearly two years ago. A better action on the part of the FDA would have been an outright ban on BPA, instead of this namby-pamby innocent until proven guilty or the consumers do enough cage-rattling.

Oy.