In response to an earlier report by the news agent Mother Jones accusing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of scientific misconduct in its recent bisphenol A (BPA) study (reported previously by the FPF), the news provider Forbes argues that the article is an attempt to undermine the credibility of future studies on BPA. In the article published on April 9, 2014, Trevor Butterworth, contributor to Forbes, maintains that the scientists interviewed by Mother Jones are worried that the CLARITY project, a cooperation between the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), FDA and independent academic scientists (FPF reported previously), may eventually find BPA safe and casts doubt on their integrity. Butterworth criticizes that these scientists continue to receive grants for BPA studies using Sprague Dawley rats, even though they previously declared the strain insensitive to EDCs.  In the Mother Jones article, Gail Prins, professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, U.S., had expressed astonishment that the study was even accepted for publication considering the contamination and its low profile reporting. In response, Gary Miller, Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journal Toxicological Sciences in which the study was published, argues that sufficient attention was dedicated to the contaminated controls in order for it to qualify for publication. Butterworth further points to a second article published simultaneously in Toxicological Sciences which elaborates on the criticized contaminated controls (Churchwell et al. 2014). By email correspondence the FDA further contended that the contamination was very low and taken into account in the evaluation of the results. In his article, Butterworth concludes that the recent FDA publication is uncomfortable for scientists having vouched for the threat posed by BPA, in particular if the results of future publications from the CLARITY project are not to confirm this assumption.

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Trevor Butterworth (April 2014). “BPA: The Scientists, The Scare, The 100-Million Dollar Surge.Forbes.

FPF article “Scientists criticize FDA study on BPA

FPF article “How new research will shed light on BPA

References

Churchwell, M. et al. (2014). “Comparison of lifestage-dependent internal dosimetry for bisphenol A, ethinyl estradiol, a reference estrogen, and endogenous estradiol to test an estrogenic mode of action in Sprague-Dawley rats.Toxicological Sciences (published online February 4, 2014).

Delclos, K.B. et al. (2014). “Toxicity evaluation of bisphenol A administered by gavage to Sprague-Dawley rats from gestation day 6 through postnatal day 90.” Toxicological Sciences (published online February 3, 2014).

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