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Originally posted by Mudman21
Of the 84,000 chemicals on the market today -- many of which are in objects that people come into contact with every day -- only about 1 percent of them have been studied for safety, Sen. Frank Lautenberg said Tuesday.
Link to Article
1976: First law to regulate industrial chemicals, fails to establish safety of BPA. Congress passes the Toxic Substances Control Act, the first law in the U.S. to regulate industrial chemicals. BPA is one of 62,000 chemicals "grandfathered" in, presumed safe by the Environmental Protection Agency with no evaluation of the evidence.
1982: Government assessment of BPA toxicity holds no regulatory weight. The National Toxicology Program determines that the lowest adverse effect level (LOAEL) for BPA in laboratory animals is 1,000 parts per million (ppm), equivalent to 50 milligrams of BPA per kilogram of body weight per day (50 mg/kg/d) (NTP 1982). This study becomes the basis for EPA's 1988 safety standard which has remained in place for decades, sorely out of step with scores of low-dose BPA toxicity studies published in the interim.
1988:
EPA's safety standard for BPA is up to 25 times higher than harmful levels. US EPA sets a safety standard (reference dose) for BPA, based on crude, high-dose BPA studies showing reduced body weight of exposed animals, establishing the standard in 1988 and reaffirming it in 1993. The "safe" exposure level established by EPA, at 50 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight per day (50 ug/kg/d), is 1,000 times lower than amounts found to affect the growth of animals in high-dose industry studies. But when a series of studies over the next 20 years show BPA to be toxic at doses far below EPA's safety standard (as low as 2 ug/kd/d), the Agency fails to update the standard to reflect the new information.