EU report backs safety of BPA
By Staff -- Playthings, 7/24/2008 8:19:00 AM
PARMA, Italy—The European Food Safety Authority yesterday issued a report affirming the safety of the controversial chemical bisphenol A (BPA), most often found in plastic baby bottles and other food-contact materials.
The conclusion of EFSA’s panel on Food Additives, Flavourings, Processing Aids and Materials in Contact with Food (AFC) was that after exposure to BPA the human body more rapidly metabolises and eliminates the substance than it does in the rats used for testing BPA’s potentially harmful effects in previous studies.
The AFC Panel, in its final session, took into account both the previous and the most recent information and data available on the way that BPA and related substances are handled in the human body, the EFSA said.
The Panel concluded that the exposure of a human fetus to BPA would be negligible because the mother rapidly metabolises and eliminates BPA from her body. The scientists also concluded that newborns are similarly able to metabolise and eliminate BPA at doses below 1 milligram per kilogram of body weight per day. This implies that newborns could effectively clear BPA at levels in excess of the AFC Panel’s 2006 recommendation of there be a total daily intake (TDI) limit of BPA of 0.05 milligrams per kilogram of body weight.
In its previous risk assessment, the AFC Panel derived a TDI of 0.05 mg/kg body weight based on the no-observed-adverse-effect level of 5 milligram/kg body weight/day for effects in rats and included an uncertainty factor of 100. In this latest assessment, the Panel concluded that this TDI provides a sufficient margin of safety for the protection of the consumer, including fetuses and newborns.
In revisiting the issue, EFSA took note of the U.S. National Toxicology Program’s draft brief on BPA and of the Canadian government’s recent Draft Screening Assessment on BPA, which took into account findings from the low-dose studies, notably with respect to neuron-developmental toxicity, though both pointed out that these studies were limited in rigor, consistency and biological plausibility. It also noted a recent European Commission Joint Research Centre report that concluded that, due to the low confidence in the reliability of developmental neurotoxicity studies and the lack of consistency in the results of behavioral testing, no conclusions could be drawn from these studies.
