Saturday, May 23, 2009

Look through a glass, cheerfully

SCIENCE DAILY has a disturbing report, "BPA, Chemical Used To Make Plastics, Found To Leach From Polycarbonate Drinking Bottles Into Humans". This may be old hat to some, but it bears repeating because the stuff is so pervasive, like can linings, for example. This means it's easy to eschew plastic-bottled water, and still get contaminated. Canned beer sucks, anyway.

A new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers found that participants who drank for a week from polycarbonate bottles -- the popular, hard-plastic drinking bottles and baby bottles -- showed a two-thirds increase in their urine of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA).

Exposure to BPA, used in the manufacture of polycarbonate and other plastics, has been shown to interfere with reproductive development in animals and has been linked with cardiovascular disease and diabetes in humans.

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