BPA goes cha-ching! (Part 1)

A recent study done on mice discovered that bisphenol A (BPA) increases neural sensitivity to pain.[1]

This is very interesting to me for several reasons. One reason is that I have many years of experience as a cashier.

BPA is used to make thermal paper for cash register receipts as well as grease resistant food wrappers for the restaurant industry.[2]

When Poppy Bush was president and running for reelection, he visited a supermarket seemingly for the first time.

Old Poppy Bush, we were told, was fascinated by the barcode scanner at the cash register. Found the technology amazing! The entire spectrum of media ridiculed him for being awestruck by technology which had already been in widespread use for decades. It seemed commonplace to the common people but for the president it was some wonderous newfangled device.[3]

One of the cashiers asked the president a question about cancer.

He didn't have an answer.

The question was related to the occupation of cashier. It was about workplace safety as much as it was about cancer.

At the time there were millions of women working as cashiers in the supermarkets and they were becoming worried about their occupational health. Cashiers were developing cancers (especially cancers of the reproductive organs and breasts) and having multiple miscarriages.

A few suspected that it may have been the laser in the scanner to blame. They didn't realize it was the paper receipts which they handled every day that were leaching endocrine disrupting chemicals (specifically BPA but also others) into their bloodstream.[4]

A study was allegedly performed which failed to demonstrate any carcinogenic potential in a cashier's repeated exposure to the laser beam in the scanner and everyone just forgot about it. The corporate media pretty much wrote it off as at best a conspiracy theory or at worst just crazy women being paranoid and believing in a connection of more than coincidence.

It wasn't until decades later that another study was performed which discovered the use of hand sanitizer increases the absorption of BPA from the receipt paper.[5][6]

Cashiers have long been routinely advised by employers and the Corporate Media to regularly use hand sanitizer at work, especially during the "flu season".[7]

Around the same time as the laser cancer debunking story was circulating in the corporate media, I had begun working in the nutritional supplement and natural foods industry.

At the first shop were I worked for a couple years, we had a regular customer who suffered from fibromyalgia. She told me that her lifelong family doctor swore that her pain was "all in her head" and it took her several years to find a doctor who didn't consider fibromyalgia to be a psychosomatic condition. [8][9]

She had been a cashier.

She had worked for almost 20 years as a cashier and became so sick that she had to retire from working before her pension and benefits became fully vested.

She was extremely picky about everything. She would only buy herbs and vitamins which came in glass bottles. She went out of her way to avoid any contact with any type of plastic.

She would order a "Green Goddess" sandwich from the cafe and reject it if the chef brought her food out in either a styrofoam box or plastic wrap. The chef was requested to use only butcher paper and a brown paper bag.

She said that if her food came in contact with plastic or styrofoam it would make her violently ill with one day of vomiting followed by two or three days of being too physically weak to function.

One time she angrily confronted the chef because, instead of remaking the sandwich for her, he went out the side door for a smoke break then unwrapped the rejected sandwich from the plastic wrap and gave it to her as if it was a fresh sandwich. He was certain that she couldn't have known. He was wrong.

She said the sandwich was delicious but it came back to bite her about two hours later.

Everyone thought she was crazy.

I talked with her many times attempting to understand her condition so I could provide good customer service with some appropriate product suggestions. The other employees and the shop owners were stumped as to how to help her and gave up trying. I didn't know any better. I listened to her.

She was the first person to tell me about endocrine disrupting chemicals.

I had tried to hand her the receipt for her purchase but she refused to accept it.

"Those things are toxic," she said.

I said, "what? How?"

She began to explain thermal receipt paper. I showed her that the shop register was a much older model and the receipt was actually printed with ink.

She said, "that's probably just as bad."

She was probably not wrong.

It certainly wasn't all in her head. A lot of real money changed hands to make all of this happen.

- Marvin Scott Marvin, 2019

[Originally published on Minds]

https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1191847270291750912

All references are in the resources section below.