The latest campaign against phthalates announced today by Health Care Without Harm is another rehash of old theories and guesswork that didn't "take" the first time around for a very good reason: the weight of the scientific evidence does not support its claims.

Only the tactics are new. HCWH misuses government data in an attempt to scare women into avoiding certain products. And it implies that the Food and Drug Administration isn't doing its job, in an apparent attempt to bully FDA into buying the HCWH line and abandoning its commitment to anchoring regulations on solid scientific evidence.

The report's main argument is speculative - there is simply no evidence that the different phthalates have an additive effect. And there is some evidence that two phthalates highlighted in the report - DEHP and DBP -- don't. Phthalates are a group of widely different chemicals with widely different performance characteristics. To suggest that one should add up the various phthalate exposures to compute risk might be a good scare tactic, but it is not good science. Phthalates are among the most extensively studied families of chemicals used today, and there has never been any reliable evidence that the phthalates used in products over the last 50 years or so ever caused anyone any harm - a point that HCWH concedes.

In a report replete with errors and artful phrasing, two distortions are the most unjustifiable. These are particularly harmful because they could cause unnecessary worry by the public.

First, it is wrong to imply that a woman whose exposure to phthalates exceeds the safety levels set by the government has passed a concrete boundary beyond which she will injure herself - or her unborn child. Safety levels are those to which a person, even a sensitive person or child, can be exposed day after day, year after year, for a lifetime, without ill effects. Those levels have margins of safety built into them that put them at a hundred of times below the no-effect level seen in laboratory animals.

Second, it is misleading to state that women of childbearing age have higher levels of phthalates in them than the general population, and that a child they may be carrying could therefore be at risk. The facts are that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) surveyed 289 persons for exposure to phthalates and found that a very few of the 98 women aged 20 to 40 in the sample had levels above the average. The sample is so small that there is no justification for making the sweeping statements that are being made. In fact, the CDC has decided not to break down a second study of 1,029 persons by age group because even that larger sample size is too small to support any conclusions. Finally, those few women in the smaller survey had exposures less than one-thousandth of the level in which no effect was seen in laboratory animals.

The Phthalate Esters Panel of the American Chemistry Council and its member companies, and the American Chemistry Council believe that more than 50 years of study, numerous peer-reviewed and published scientific papers, and a long history of use without any reliable evidence of harm is a more than sufficient answer to the theories of Health Care Without Harm -theories it has not itself bothered to put to the test.

Related Link: Phthalates Information Center -- Some Incorrect Statements by Health Care Without Harm -- July 10, 2002

Contact:
Marian K. Stanley
Manager, Phthalate Esters Panel (www.phthalates.org)
(703) 741-5623
E-mail: marian_stanley@americanchemistry.com