Bad Science May Banish Paper Receipts

California lawmakers seek a ban, based on a scare over BPA that was debunked two decades ago.

By Steve Milloy. Mr. Milloy publishes JunkScience.com, served on the Trump EPA transition team, and is author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA.” Excerpt:

In 1997 there was "a highly publicized Tulane University study that reported certain combinations of pesticides and other chemicals in the environment were much more potent endocrine disrupters than the individual chemicals themselves. Within weeks, this study prompted Congress to pass a bill directing the Environmental Protection Agency to develop a program to test chemicals for their potential harm to hormonal systems.

In the months that followed, the Tulane study began to fall apart. Independent laboratories around the world reported that they could not replicate its results. By July 1997, the original study was retracted. Federal investigators concluded in 2001 that the Tulane researchers had committed scientific misconduct by falsifying their results.

Yet the law and regulatory programs spawned by the false study remained in place. The endocrine-disrupter scare gained steam through the 2000s, and BPA became its biggest villain. Generous federal funding led to the publication of hundreds of BPA studies. A movement to ban BPA was joined by several cities, states such as California, and foreign nations including Canada, resulting in the elimination of the substance from plastic bottles in those regions. Regulators at the Food and Drug Administration and the European Food Safety Authority pushed back against the scare, to little avail.

Finally in 2012, the FDA decided to launch Clarity, a large $8 million study of BPA to be conducted according to regulatory guidelines known as the Good Laboratory Practices standard. Researchers, including those who had published studies claiming that low-dose exposures to BPA posed health risks, were provided with coded, pre-dosed animals to avoid bias and cheating. Researchers were required to upload their raw data to a government database before the identity of each dose group was disclosed to them.

The results of Clarity were published in 2018. The FDA concluded that the study failed to demonstrate adverse health effects from exposure to BPA in low doses—like the amount one might be exposed to by handling a paper receipt."