Cherry Lacang thought that she’ll be able to finish her Accountancy degree in Mindanao State University, free of any respiratory disease being away from city with all the smoke coming out from all the factories and many vehicles.
Students in MSU are enjoying an affordable tuition fee with affordable food, minus fare since almost all students walk in attending their classes.
The university offers not just affordable tuition fee. As a matter of fact, students from other universities even think that everything is accessible here. An ordinary student could eat thrice a day and take some snacks between meals. A certain area is designated for “karenderias.” They sell different variety of food everyday. Students buy food from this area and bring the food they’ve bought at home. Everybody seems immune with the scenario of beautiful women and macho-gwapito boys with plastic cellophane in hand containing newly cooked foods from 5th Street going home. This has been an MSU lifestyle already.
When several students were asked why they prefer taking home the food they’ve bought rather than eating inside these karenderias available, the answers were almost the same. Their answer was either they’re comfortable eating at home or they want to avoid acquiring whatever disease they could possibly acquire from using the utensils available inside.
Plastic is made by combining monomers into polymers under great heat and pressure in the pressure in the process called polymerization. Each manufacturer has its own propriety formula for each plastic. And each uses a variety of additives such as plasticizers for flexibility, UV filters for protection from sunlight, antistatic agent, flame-retardants, colorants, antioxidants and more.
Heavy metals such as cadmium, mercury and lead are common additives. These are also chemicals used to facilitate production such as mold releases and countless other toxic chemicals added to plastic consumer good without our knowledge or approval.
Plastics are ubiquitous in our lives because it is convenient and relatively inexpensive. Its convenience comes from being light weight and its ability to absorb impact shock without breaking, which in its own merit, is hard to argue with. It comes in an endless range of colors and finishes, is pliable and is easily formed and molded. Its inexpensiveness is the result of the large portion of the costs associated with its life—production, use and disposal and molded.
For decades, the plastic industry has been giving the assurance that the polymerization process binds the constituent chemicals together so perfectly that the resulting plastic is completely non toxic and passes through us without a hitch.
When you eat or drink things are stored in plastic, taste it, smell it, wear it, sit on it and so on, plastic is incorporated into you. In fact, the plastic gets into the food and food gets into the plastic and you. So, quite literally, you are what you eat, drink, and breath—plastic! These plastics are called “Food Contact Substances” by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but until April 2002, they were called “Indirect Food Additives.” The new name was cleansed of the implication that plastic gets into your food. In spite of this semantic deception, migration is a key assumption of the FDA.
However, in 1995, the Bisphenol-A Toxicology Task force of the society pf plastic industry, Incorporated completed a comprehensive review of available data on BPA. Seven laboratory animal reproduction and development tests, including four conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program were reviewed. These studies found no evidence that BPA selectively affects reproduction or development. Rather, effects on reproduction and development were observed only at the doses of BPA so high that the health of the pregnant animal was compromised. These conclusions are consistent with those reported in the Comprehensive European Union Risk Assessment on BPA.
A hypothesis has been advanced claiming that exposure to extremely low doses of certain substances could cause adverse health effects in humans, including disruption of normal hormonal functions. According to this “low-dose hypothesis,” health effects occur at doses far below levels previously determined to be safe using well-established toxicological procedures and principles. The hypothesis further asserts that the dose-response relationship for the substance is “non-monotonic,” which means that health effects may only be observed at low-doses while much higher doses result in no effects.
The low-dose hypothesis is largely based on several small-scale experimental studies that report reproductive or developmental effects in mice or rats from low doses of BPA. Several attempts to confirm the hypothesis by repeating these initial experiments have shown that the results are not capable of replication which indicates that the hypothesis is not valid. Therefore, definitive large-scale experiments using accepted protocols have also found no evidence for reproductive or developmental effects from low-doses of BPA. A number of independent scientific bodies after reviewing all available evidence have concluded that the low-dose hypothesis is unproven.
One study conducted was considered most comprehensive was a three generation study at the Research Triangle Institute under the direction of Dr. Rochelle Tyl. In this study, Sprague-Dawley rats were fed a diet containing BPA at levels from 0-7500 parts per million, yielding approximate intakes of 0, 0.001, 0.02, 0.3, 5, 50, or 500 mg/kg body weight per day. Exposures were continued until adulthood of the third generation offspring and wide variety of relevant endpoints for the parental and three offspring generations revealed no evidence of a low dose effect of BPA. It clearly demonstrated the absence of low dose effects for BPA.
These studies generally show that under typical use conditions, the potential migration of BPA into food is extremely low. Migration testing under conditions that are typical ofhow polycarbonate products are actually used, indicates that migration of BPA, when detected, is generally less than five parts per billion. The potential human exposure to BPA ismore than 400 times lower than the US EPA reference dose. The minimal level of exposure to BPA poses no known risk to human health. That’s their claim.
On the other hand, according to Dr. George Pauli, Associate Director of Science Policy, FDA Office of Food Additive Safety, the regulations mandated in 1958 assume that all plastics in to the food they contact. Migration is the movement of free toxins from plastic into the substances they contact—in this case, it’s your food.
Extremely low doses are especially relevant because they can upset the natural balance of the Endocrine System (EDs) are external agents that interfere with the production, release, transport, metabolism, binding, action or elimination of natural hormones in the body responsible for maintaining internal balances and the regulation of developmental processes. Some chemicals can be more toxic at extremely low doses than extremely high doses. The timing of the exposure can much more be relevant than its done. Most vulnerable are in periods of rapid growth, such as those in embryo and children right up to puberty. They can be exposed in the womb and before conception, sperm/ovum are contaminated.
Synergy is also one issue that is mostly disregarded by the FDA. A synergy can occur between two or more chemicals that elevate the combination’s toxicity to hundred of times greater then that of the individual chemicals.
In April 2003, a study was published about BPA accidentally killing mice that had been held in polycarbonate cages at a lab. It was accidentally found when it ruined a lab experiment that heated yeast in PC flasks to find out if the yeast produced estrogen. It was discovered that BPA from PC flasks was the material that was estrogenic, and that it completed with the natural estrogen in the rats body.
The list of negative health effects associated in some way with exposure to BPA is remarkably long. The most visible effect and what really scares most is uneuploidy, a chromosome abnormality found in more than 5% of pregnancies. Most uneuploid fetuses die in utero. About one-third of all miscarriages are uneuploid, making it the leading known cause of pregnancy loss. Among conceptions that survive, uneuploidy is the leading genetic cause of developmental disabilities and mental retardation. It is associated with Down syndrome, Patau syndrome, Edward’s syndrome, and other diseases including Alzheimer’s.
Bisphenol-A, being one of many unknown endocrine disruptors, BPA affects development, intelligence, memory, learning, and behavior, skeleton, body size and shape, significant increase in prostate size, decreased epididymal weight and longer anogenital distance, prostate cancer, reduced sperm count, both physical and mental aspects of sexuality.
BPA is about 10,000-fold less potent than 17B-estradiol, a potent estrogen that is synthesized primarily in the ovary, but also in the placenta, testis and possibly adrenal cortex. Because of the disparity, industry representatives claim that it causes no harm at the levels that the majority of the people are exposed to.
The government has been passive regarding the possible negative health effects of the use of plastic, so are we. There is actually even minimal number of researches conducted in the Philippines that which can be considered as one of the reasons why Filipinos are less aware or even totally unaware of the negative health effects of the use of plastic.
According to an expert, this issue has sprung from rivalry among beverage producing companies such as coca-cola. Some researchers intervened but had to back-off before these companies conspire with each other and file a case against them. As a matter of fact, there are only few researches that found the negative effects of the use of plastic in human health that succeeded and were published or told to the public while many articles and researches using different doctors, scientists, and institutions in denying these hazards.
In the campus, using plastic is rampant and there was no enough warning from the people we consider as experts in terms of the chemical components and its hazards to human. Though we couldn’t solely put the blame to those experts, we still consider their lack of concern and knowledge as a factor of this ignorance.
The issue of plastic cellophane in the campus as food container is found by the students to be beneficial, either because they can throw the cellophane after use, which means, they no longer have to wash dishes after.
Though it’s a hard habit to break, now is the right time for us to think if we are really saving something by depriving ourselves of the washing dishes.
Sources:
- ecologycenter.org
- Prof. Nelia Autor
Chemistry Department
College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics
