THE bisphenol A (BPA), one of the main endocrine disruptors, is present in 92% of Europeans’ bodies. It represents a potential danger to their health, according to a report from the European Environment Agency (EEA) published Thursday.
“As part of a recent human biomonitoring initiative, HEM4EU, BPA was detected in 92% of adult participants from eleven European countries,” the Agency wrote.
Based on an April study by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) which drastically reduced the maximum daily dose of bisphenol A considered safe for the consumer, the EEA, based in Copenhagen, considers that “in the 11 countries that participated in the BPA biomonitoring initiative, the level of exceedance varied between 71% and 100%”.
Bisphenol A, long omnipresent in many products such as plastic bottlesis suspected of being linked to multiple disorders and diseases — breast cancer, infertility, etc. — due to the hormonal disturbances it causes.
Already banned
In some countries like France, BPA is now banned in food containers. The European Union (EU) and the United States have restricted its use and are considering a more drastic limitation, although this has not yet been implemented.
The debates concern in particular the dose at which bisphenol A is truly dangerous. However, for the EFSA, this is much lower than what we thought: it divided it by 20,000 compared to a previous evaluation, an opinion contested by another agency, the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
For the European environmental policeman, however, there is no doubt that exposure to BPA “is well above acceptable health safety levels (…) which represents a risk for the health of millions of people”.
Thresholds exceeded in France
The product and two of its substitutes (bisphenol S and F) were measured between 2014 and 2020 in the urine of 2,756 adults across 11 countries.
It is in Switzerland that the levels exceed the thresholds the least, with 71%, while they exceed them in 100% of cases in France, Luxembourg and Portugal, reports the AEE, noting that the exceedances reported are minimum figures.
“It is likely that in reality, all 11 countries have rates of 100% exceedance of exposure levels above safety thresholds,” the agency warned.