BPA: Soon to Be “Toxic”, Currently in Our Bodies

We have some good news to report regarding the designation of bisphenol A (BPA) as “toxic” under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. The federal government is moving forward on its commitment to designate it as such, having stated that this will occur within the next 8-10 weeks. As mentioned in an earlier blog post, the reason for the 2-year "toxic" designation delay is because a formal notice of objection was filed.

Information reveals that the objection, which asked the federal government to reconsider the “toxic” designation, was filed on July 15, 2009 by the American Chemistry Council. However, now that the government has considered the notice and dismissed it given that no new data was brought forth, we’re going to see BPA’s addition to Canada’s Toxic Substances List relatively soon. For more information, check out this Postmedia article by Sarah Schmidt.

This is particularly good news given that the day before the above story was published, results from the federal government’s Canada-wide biomonitoring project (the Canadian Health Measures Survey (CHMS)) showed that 91% of Canadians aged 6 to 79 had detectable concentrations of BPA in their urine. This is the first time BPA was measured at a national level. Given associated evidence that regulating substances and removing them from our products and environment works - lead concentrations in Canadians’ blood have gone from about 27% to less than 1% at or above the intervention level over 30 years – the move towards designating BPA as “toxic” and opening up the possibility for further action on the substance is most welcome. For more on the CHMS results, check out the full report by Heatlh Canada.