Last month, 26 percent of Coca-cola shareholders expressed concern about BPA, asking the company to reveal its plans for the future concerning the chemical. But that wasn’t a large enough proportion for the top brass to do anything about it.

A study at Penn State University School of Medicine found a correlation between fetal exposure to BPA and wheezing in infants. BPA, you recall, is the false estrogen that is used in manufacturing clear plastic bottles, lining food and beverage cans, manufacturing thermal paper for receipts, and so on.

After eating a diet of freshly prepared food with no plastic packaging for just three days, the amount of BPA in their urine dropped by an average of 66 percent.

Think you’re safe from false estrogens because you’ve got a “bpa-free” plastic water bottle? Think again.

The FDA and the EPA are using outdated testing and review procedures for chemicals, according to scientists representing societies from eight fields who signed a letter in the journal Science.

With all those 8 billion pounds of synthetic estrogen BPA produced every year, some is in the air, researchers have found, and some is, yes, on our money.

Vom Saal’s lab has been testing fetal exposures that are far, far lower than the levels the FDA’s toxicologists are thinking about, and finding adverse effects in animal studies. The reason BPA acts in such tiny doses is that that is the way the body is designed to work, responding to tiny doses of hormones in the bloodstream. “We are between 10 and a hundred to a thousand-million times lower than whatever toxicologists were thinking about,” said Vom Saal.

A new study in the journal Pediatrics found puberty starting in girls at the age of 7 at roughly twice the rate found 10 years ago. The researchers from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital examined 1,200 girls between ages six and eight, in 2004 and 2006. They lived in Cincinnati, San Francisco, and East Harlem, N Y.  [...]

A physician, Samuel S. Epstein, wrote a book last year on the subject and chairs the Cancer Prevention Coalition. The coalition seeks to get the FDA to act on its mandate to get rid of toxic or potentially toxic ingredients in personal care products, such as lotion, deodorant, or shampoo. So far, apparently, the FDA has NEVER banned a personal care product ingredient in the past sixty years. That despite a mandate in the law that set it up: “Each ingredient used in a cosmetic product and each finished cosmetic product shall be adequately substantiated for safety prior to marketing.” Hence there are plenty of cosmetics and personal care products out there that contain “allergens, hormones, carcinogens and their precursors, and ultra-microscopic nanoparticles,” Epstein charges. These include phthalates and BPA.

The report, Seeking Safer Packaging 2010, tallies the results of questionnaires sent to food companies, and gives each company a grade. To get an A, a company has to be taking steps to test materials and eliminate use of BPA, and also has to have a time table for getting rid of it.

I don’t know about you, but I want to support the companies that are making efforts in this area. Here is who got the A grades: