Baby feeding bottles sold in India are made of Bisphenol-A or BPA, an endocrine-disrupting chemical, which adversely impacts the mental and physical health.
Research studies conducted and recently published by Toxics Link, a non-government organisation, titled “Bottles Can Be Toxic: An Investigative Study on Bisphenol-A in Baby Feeding Bottles in India” found that 78.5 per cent of the fourteen samples collected had high amount of BPA.
Some of the samples had BPA concentration in the bottles as high as 9.8ppm. About 50 per cent of the samples adhered to the EU’s threshold limit of 0.6ppm.
As part of the study, samples of feeding bottles were randomly collected from three regions of India — Delhi’s National Capital Region, Baripada (Odisha) and Madhya Pradesh and sent for lab testing at Shriram Institute for Industrial Research (SIIR), Delhi.
Currently, a range of chemicals are used in manufacturing plastic products that interfere with the human body’s hormonal production, release, transportation, binding, and other activities that are instrumental in normal human growth and one of the most known harmful chemical is BPA.
Besides disrupting the functioning of hormones in the babies, BPA negatively impacts the behavioural and emotional aspects of girls up to three years old. Among the boys, it leads to depression and anxiety, while, in general, epidemiological studies have found it to leads to heart diseases, liver toxicity and diabetes.
“Several studies have also shown that BPA leeches out from the feeding bottles after dishwashing, boiling or bruising thus contaminating other products, which makes the babies all the more vulnerable,” says Piyush Mahapatra, senior programme coordinator, Toxics Link.
The feeding bottles in India are regulated by the Infant Milk Substitutes, Feeding Bottles and Infant Foods (Regulation of Production, Supply and Distribution) Act, 1992, as amended in 2003 (IMS Act). The act mandates that all the baby feeding bottles to be sold in India will be subjected to the standard IS-14625 specified by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS).
“The BIS has revised the standard for baby feeding bottle in 2013, and prepared a draft notification stating BPA is not to be used in baby feeding bottles. But strangely, the draft has not been published yet,” says Satish Sinha, associate director, Toxics Link.
