Politics in a Bottle: BPA, Children’s Health, and the Fight for Toxics Reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The nationwide legal uprising against the chemical bisphenol A (more popularly known as BPA) began in Minnesota in 2009 when the state legislature there voted to ban the substance from children’s products—including sippy cups and baby bottles. Grassroots activism aimed at instituting local and state-level legislation banning BPA in children’s products has since escalated as new players in the world of toxics activism have emerged with demands to remove the controversial chemical from products designed for use by children. Frustrated with inaction at the federal level following scores of health studies, a slew of ambiguous regulatory reviews, and staunch efforts by lobby organizations, these new groups have taken their fight about BPA and health to states, counties, cities, and local municipalities. As of this writing, eleven U.S. states now have legislation banning or restricting the use of BPA in products for kids. These actions in the United States followed actions taken by Canada to first identify BPA as a minimal health hazard to children (in 2008) and then to later officially recognized BPA as toxic (in 2010), a declaration that requires government action. Indeed, all of this action at the state level is having the intended effect: The federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced in July of 2012 that BPA could no longer be used in baby bottles and children’s drinking cups. But that pronouncement has done little to quell the debate. As the president of the National Research Center for Women and Families noted about the July 2012 decision: “[The FDA is] instituting a ban that is already in effect voluntarily.” The sentiment is congruent with the statements made by the American Chemistry Council (the nation’s largest lobby group for the chemical industry) following the announcement. According to the statement, the American Chemistry Council requested that the FDA take action because of the patchwork of legislation taking shape at the state level and that had already encouraged most manufacturers to simply stop using BPA in these products (Tavernise 2012).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".