BabyNews.co.za

Tuesday 7 October 2008 - The Cancer Association of South Africa (CANSA) has noted with growing concern the increasing scientific evidence that babies and young children are exposed to many man-made chemicals, some of which may be harmful because they are hormone disrupters and could be risk-factors for breast and prostate cancer in later life.  What is of particular concern is the finding that babies have the highest concentration of some of these man-made molecules.

A number of countries have identified specific man-made molecules of concern and have taken legislative steps to ban the use of these chemicals especially in items that come into contact with young children and babies – who are most vulnerable.

We here at BabyNews have been following the recent news media furore over Bisphenol-A (BPA) and the effects that it has on humans, and more-over, on the little humans... our babies.

Our editors have been on the lookout for BPA-Free products for a few years more, before it became a buzz-word on the Internet, for completely different reasons. Our history has more to do with Cancer forming cells and Endometriosis and the more we find out about this substance, the more it is becoming clear that this is a product we need to get off the shelves and out of the country.

Unfortunately, during the last few months of trying to find BPA-free products, it has become clear to us that profit ranks above the health and safety of consumers & users, and in this case, defenseless users.

Sean-Duncan has reached another milestone this last week, in the form of nutrition... He had his first bottle (expressed breast-milk)  this weekend, and although it took him a while to figure out how this work, and why his daddy became a mommy, he got it in the end and drank his first 50mils  with gusto!

So officially he is now 4.8kg (had his second doctors visit, the "Paranoid Parent" 6-week checkup) is 57cm tall (or is that long... seeing that he is not really standing yet?) and is on another growth spurt... Not sure how that works. depending on who you are asking, there is a growth spurt at 3, 6 and 9 weeks, or from the other book, 4, 6 and 12 weeks... It seems Sean-Duncan doesn't want to mss anything so he decided to rather cover all of them and we see his "Growth Spurt" behavior on 3, 4 and 6 weeks... will let you know if this continues through to 9 and 12 weeks...

As you may or may not have noticed, we have started a BPA watchlist of baby products (initially pertaining to feeding) available to consumers here in South Africa. It was startling to find out that less than 30% of the website users on our own site and on other parenting forums had any idea what BPA is or why it is dangerous.

Therefor we decided to give more advice to our local, South African site users about this potentially dangerous product that seems to be in every house in South Africa.

We have systematically started to contact he importers of the main product lines to find updated lists of what their products are made of, and whether it's BPA free, and shockingly, very few of them had any idea of what was in their products, either referring us to their international head-offices or promising to get back to us on the topic.

Some of the companies have done surprisingly well though, and this is the story of one of them.