Seneca girl’s study becomes part of scientific debate w/ link to learn more about BPA

By Melissa Dunson

mdunson@joplinglobe.com

SENECA, Mo. — Taylor Gaines, 13, loves her baby brother, Jace, 2.

But she feared her family was inadvertently poisoning him.

Taylor, a Seneca eighth-grader, has been fascinated with science since she was 7 years old. Her mother, Shannon Sample, is a science research teacher at Seneca High School. Her uncle works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

“I was surrounded by science,” Taylor said. “People would think I was so educated because I would listen to my mom talk at dinner.”

So when she heard reports that bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical compound that is a building block used in some plastics, could be hazardous to humans, she was concerned. BPA is used in a variety of plastic products, including Jace’s baby bottles and most brands of water bottles. Questions about whether it is harmful to human health have been around for years.

With her middle-school science fair coming up, Taylor decided to forgo the traditional solar system or volcano project, and instead do some BPA research that could directly affect her family.

Taylor was disturbed by what she found, and although the Environmental Protection Agency is standing by its estimated safe level of BPA, several recent national studies show the eighth-grader may be on the right track.

In her experiment, Taylor exposed planarian worms to different concentrations of BPA, including half of the EPA’s recommended safe level, as well as four times, 40 times and 400 times the recommended level.

Taylor said her experiment showed six abnormalities at all of the concentration levels. Those abnormalities include missing body parts, regeneration of too many body parts, tumor-like growths, undeveloped body parts and delayed re-growth of body parts.

She believes her research suggests that even federally recommended levels of BPA could be harmful to humans.

Suzanne Ackerman, EPA press officer, applauded Taylor’s research, and said she was amazed that an eighth-grade student took on such a weighty experiment. But Ackerman said the EPA’s safe level of BPA of 0.05 parts per million is safe for humans, but not for something as small as a worm.

“An oral reference dose is an estimate of how much of a chemical a human being could intake daily over a lifetime without harmful effects,” Ackerman said. “Besides the size comparison, the human metabolism is very, very different.”

But a study just released last month by the National Toxicology Program, an inter-agency federal research program at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, said that current human exposure to BPA is of “some concern” for its effects on the development of fetuses, infants and children.