BPA Science

“Trust Robust Science, Don’t Blame BPA”, By BPA Coalition.
The exposure of a fraud who stoked BPA fears to advance his career should remind us all to trust robust science from authoritative sources. On September 10, NBC News in the United States revealed that Anoop Shankar, a researcher at West Virginia University, had fabricated his qualifications to obtain his position and also allegedly altered his research findings. This is of particular interest for the BPA Coalition because several of his studies, published from 2011 to 2013, claimed that BPA exposure could be linked to diabetes or obesity despite known shortcomings in his research method. One WVU press release went so far as to claim that limiting exposure to BPA would prevent 10 percent of diabetes cases. While the industry pointed out regularly that studies like the Shankar ones are incapable of showing a causal link, media and activists grabbed hold of his studies because it confirmed what they wanted to hear: BPA is bad. This is wrong. In fact, over and over, health agencies regulating BPA for use in human contact applications have found that BPA-based materials do not pose any safety or health problems. Indeed, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) assessed all of Shankar’s now-questionable studies in its 2014 initial report, and determined that the studies were “not suitable to study exposure-disease associations.” Read more.