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If you’re looking to avoid further hormonal freakouts brought on by the hated Bisphenol A ( BPA) — a frightening endocrine disruptor reportedly found in 96 percent of women but consumed more by their children, then you might want to clean out your wallet. Or perhaps forego shopping receipts altogether until you hear otherwise from conclusive scientific studies — which could take many years to straggle in.

Two years ago, Canada became the first country to outright declare BPA, a controversially toxic compound for polycarbonate polymers and epoxy resins found in everyday plastics and other products, a toxic substance unsuitable for the First World. More recently, laggards like the European Union, the United States and more have banned it from baby bottles, but not everything else. That includes the thousands of point-of-sale thermal receipts ripped daily from cash registers, gas stations and other places too numerous to count, unless you’re a scientist studying the toxicity of BPA or its less-known substitute Bisphenol S ( BPS) in those receipts and resins.

It should be by now common knowledge that BPA secretes enough weak estrogen to influence serious developmental and neurological deformities and diseases, such as the  congenital defect hypospadias, a freaky misplacement of the urethra now twice as common in newborn boys as before. What is not as well known is how much BPA and BPS is in thermal receipts. In the specific case of BPS, we’re in the dark.