BPA Will KILL You! (And Elvis is ALIVE!)

On June 10, News Channel 13 in my hometown of Colorado Springs reported that, "More potentially harmful health effects have been discovered for the chemical bisphenol A..." To be sure, the language was all couched with qualifiers such as "potential," but the point was clear: We are very afraid of bisphenol A (BPA).

This was merely the latest in a long string of shoddy stories alleging BPA does serious harm. Never mind the fact that the FDA says BPA is fine, the chicken littles in the media love to scare people, so the story was repeated ad nauseum until no one even remembered where the heck it came from.

Just five days after this news story surfaced, however, a California board of seven physicians and Ph.D.s voted unanimously that the chemical posed no serious danger. As the AP reported,

"The panel, comprised of seven physicians, unanimously decided that the chemical known as BPA should not be covered under Proposition 65, a voter-approved measure used by regulators to identify substances that can cause birth defects, developmental or reproductive harm."

Conservatives are notoriously slow to defend products and companies who have come under attack by radical environmentalists, but several conservative bloggers have picked up on this story, and what they have found has been very interesting.

Most interesting to me, was blogger Rob Port, who recently noted that all the attacks trace back to Fenton Communications, a liberal PR firm that was also behind the ‘General Betray Us’ ads:

“Putting aside the fact that the claims were entirely bogus, the fear campaign against BPA was a brilliant business move for Fenton-and a win/win/win for liberals. David Fenton, of course, is a liberal activist. He represents many radical environmental groups like the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation, who could benefit from creating a bogey man. And he also represents trial lawyers, who could make millions by bringing about class action lawsuits against the manufacturers of plastics. Lastly, trial lawyers are major donors to Democratic politicians, so getting them on board was easy. And plastics competitors who didn’t use BPA could now charge absurd prices for their products at upscale stores like Whole Foods, based on the fact that their product (though more expensive) was ostensibly “safer.”

The blogosphere is a wonderful place, but it's still sad that the primary purpose for conservative bloggers is merely to set the record straight - and to correct the mistakes made by the MSM. The "dangers" of BPA are about as real as the Easter Bunny, and I'm amazed that more is not being done to point out this pathetic scare tactic.