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OAKLAND, CA — With bans on certain phthalates in place in the U.S. and European Union, and the EPA's recent listing of phthalates as "chemicals of concern," CBS News takes a look at the science behind the bans in a recent 60 Minutes report.
Phthalates are plasticizers, substances that are added to plastic to make them flexible. Like bisphenol A (which is used to make hard plastic), they are found in numerous items like backpacks, medical tubing, shower curtains, vinyl toys and practically any other soft plastic. They are also in shampoos and cosmetics.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, passed in 2008, bans the use of six types of phthalates in children's toys and products, similar to an E.U. ban from 2005. Earlier this year, the EPA started creating a Chemicals of Concern list, and said that phthalates would be one of the first additions, and the President's Cancer Panel report from this month recommended that people avoid using phthalate-containing containers when carrying, storing and heating up drinks and foods.
Phthalates, which have been around for about 50 years, have caused such a stir because they have been linked to hormone disruption. The 60 Minutes report, available in full online, says:
Congress came under pressure to act because of a study by Dr. Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist at the University of Rochester Medical School. Dr. Swan compared the levels of phthalates in a group of pregnant women with the health of the baby boys they gave birth to.
Swan told "60 Minutes" correspondent Lesley Stahl she found that the higher the level of phthalates in the mother's urine during pregnancy, the greater the problems occurred in young boys.
Asked what she found in babies, Swan said, "We found that the baby boys were in several subtle ways less completely masculine."
The report notes that instances of hypospadias (a sex organ deformity) and un-descended testicles have increased threefold and twofold, respectively, over the years. Phthalates are suspected to be the cause of such abnormalities.
But the certainty of such conclusions gets fuzzy when other studies come into play.
Dr. Richard Sharpe in Edinburgh Scotland, one of the leading phthalate researchers in the world, exposed pregnant rats to phthalates and produced a string of abnormalities in their male offspring...But when Sharpe tried the same experiment on animals much closer to humans than rats - monkeys - he got an entirely different response. He tested phthalates on pregnant marmoset monkeys. And their offspring? Completely normal.
Like the debate over the safety of bisphenol A (BPA), there is no conclusive evidence of phthalates' negative effects of humans, but also just as with BPA, there is enough concern along with existing safer alternatives that governments have acted and some companies like SC Johnson, Avon and Johnson & Johnson have voluntarily eliminated them from their products.
Toy ducks - CC license by Flickr user Aine D
Do the right thing! -
Do the right thing! - Quantify your case and substantiate it with empirically verifiable evidence or stop with the innuendos until you have a concrete case. Anyone who has been to a hospital and had any type of collection bag connected to them has had intravenous contact with phthalates. This would be millions and millions of people to be able to drawn a sample size from and make some direct and potentially negative correlations. Why aren't there any studies like this? Why do we keep getting such a shallow case against these chemicals if they're really so bad for us? Even further, if phthalates are the only product suitable for medical collection bags, how many lives have been saved because of the use of phthalates? If there's a better product than phthalates to be used to make the plastics softer and less apt to have a critical performance failure when we're trying to save lives (think blood bags), human greed would step into the market place and provide a product that performed as good or better and without any alleged collateral damages. They would eventually take over as the preferred product. So, we're still not being told the full story.
I'm glad this is finally
I'm glad this is finally coming out. Phthalates have been suspected of causing respiratory problems and even cancer, for quite some time now. It's not only found in plastic and shampoos but also in candles. I learned of this last year while researching how to make soy candles. Candlescience.com has some great phthalate-free scents to add to your soy candles. There's some great info. on their site if anyone's interested.
Dear Colleen, I think you
Dear Colleen,
I think you have a lovely name and your website looks very professional. While these two factors are not really related, it would paint the picture to me of someone who'd rather be empirical instead of being emotional when making decisions like this and concluding "finally" as if we really had the gotten anything close to finality in this quest for truth around phthalates. I'm just blown away about all of this and wondered why we don't go directly to the factories making phthalates and see how much negative evidence we can find. Further, we're going to have to come up with some pretty hefty evidence against these products when we realize how many lives have been saved over so many years just from the use of the blood bags (let alone all of the other collection bags used in medical procedures) and the tubing made with phthalates and all of this not just here but all over the world. So, do we know there's a suitable substitute for these products that must perform life-critical functions? Are you aware of why these products have been made from this material for nearly 50 years? And do you know of the other uses of these phthalates and if they too perform mission critical jobs in our lives? And does anyone who raises the specter of doom at the thought of our bodies coming in contact these chemicals have any idea how many of these babies with testicular problems occur naturally, so when Dr. Swan tells us the magnitude of the problem we have a baseline figure so we can compare actual numbers? Let's get some more facts, shall we, before we finally bury this product prematurely and the people either making a living from it or have been saved by it so we have a true comparisons.