Certain plastic baby bottles another child hazard to dump
By Julie Deardorff
Chicago Tribune
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As long as you're on alert for toys that might contain lead or dangerous magnets, consider another safety precaution: Throw out your polycarbonate plastic baby bottles too.
Or, at the very least, stop heating them.
That's the latest advice from researchers who have been warning about the ubiquitous chemical bisphenol-A (BPA), an estrogenlike compound used to make everything from shatterproof plastic baby bottles and food-can linings to bike helmets and eyeglass lenses.
There's no doubt BPA is a handy substance. But with regular use, BPA's chemical bond with polycarbonate breaks down and leaches from baby bottles and other plastic beverage containers. What concerns scientists is that BPA may mimic the natural female sex hormone estradiol. And animal research has linked even low-level exposure to everything from female reproductive disorders, early puberty, early-stage breast and prostate cancer, and decreased sperm count to attention and developmental problems.
Whether the animal studies translate to humans is a matter of intense debate. But in early August a federal panel of scientists concluded that there is "some concern" that BPA could pose some risk to the brain development of fetuses, infants or children.
Meanwhile, an independent group of 38 BPA researchers who were not part of the panel but are considered experts on the chemical issued their own warning in the journal Reproductive Toxicology: Very low levels of exposure to the chemical can potentially pose adverse health effects, especially to a fetus.
That was more than I needed to stop drinking water out of Nalgene bottles when I was pregnant and to switch from Avent bottles, which have been shown to have high leaching rates, to glass. But still I worried about my 3-year-old, who used Avent bottles for two years (and had a day-care provider who inadvertently melted the tops.) Could I undo any potential harm?
Unfortunately, no. You can only "hope that he is not really sensitive to this type of chemical," said Fred vom Saal, a professor in the division of biological sciences at the University of Missouri at Columbia and an outspoken critic of BPA. "As with everything, there is quite a range of sensitivity between individuals."
If you haven't already chosen a bottle brand, the good news is that many BPA-free bottles have come on the market. And if you're already using Avent and your child won't take a different nipple, there are a few ways to decrease an infant's exposure to the chemical:
To warm the milk, "you could heat the milk in a small steel pan, allow it to cool to body temperature and then pour it into a plastic baby bottle for actual feeding," Prins said.
"If there is a reasonable alternative to limit BPA exposure in those who are most at risk, why not try to avoid it?" asked pediatrician Ari Brown, co-author of "Baby 411"(Windsor Peak, $14.95), who now tells parents to stop using polycarbonate baby bottles until more is known. "If you haven't bought baby bottles yet, choose BPA-free alternatives such as glass bottles, opaque polypropylene bottles or those with drop-in liners.
"If you already own BPA-containing bottles, it'll cost about $50 to $100 to replace them," she added. "That's a small price in the grand scheme of what it costs to have a baby."
