France, Luxembourg and Portugal: these three countries appear on a podium which they would have done without. Indeed, 100% of adults in these three countries have levels of Bisphenol A in urine above safety thresholds.
According to a report from the European Environment Agency (EEA) published this Thursday, September 14, Bisphenol A, one of the main endocrine disruptors, is present in 92% of the organisms of adult participants from eleven European countries and represents a potential danger for their health.
Based on an April 2023 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%”.
The Swiss (a little) less affected
It is in Switzerland that the levels exceed the thresholds the least, with 71%, ahead of Germany (83%), reports the AEE. The European agency notes that the reported excesses 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. 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.
Bisphenol A, long omnipresent in many products such as plastic bottles, is suspected of being linked to multiple disorders and diseases – breast cancer, infertility, etc. – due to the hormonal disturbances it causes.
It is banned in France in food containers
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 we thought: it divided it by 20,000 compared to a previous assessment. This opinion is contested by another agency, the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
For the European environmental policeman, however, there is no doubt that exposure to BPA “is much higher than acceptable health safety levels […] which represents a potential risk to the health of millions of people.”