A letter from Becky Gillette
Folks: There is some important news about the fluoride issue. See below the article I wrote and also the responses on the Citizen website. The Coffee Party will sponsoring a forum on this topic the second Sunday in March, (March 11) at 5 p.m. At the church on Elk St. We have invited Rene Fonseca, a public health hero, to speak, and will discuss how to be effective with a campaign to prevent being drugged with fluoride against our consent. FYI, I haven’t had a cavity in 35 years, and I no longer even use toothpaste with fluoride in it.
Also please note that March 11 from 10 a.m. To 2 p.m. There will be a seed exchange at the Carnegie Library meeting room. Please bring seeds to share, and we would love to have more education exhibits like those I saw last weekend at the Kaw Valley Seed Exchange in Lawrence, KS, like one on Colony Collapse Disorder and what we can do to help prevent the loss of honeybees.
And some of your know I’ve worked on formaldehyde for years. Here is a story about the last FEMA trailer exiting New Orleans:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-
“That’s an end of an era,” said Becky Gillette, a Sierra Club activist who led efforts to expose problems with high-levels of formaldehyde in the FEMA trailers sent to the Gulf Coast. “Most of those people would have been better off living in a tent in terms of their health.”
She added: “My job isn’t done because FEMA dumped all those poisonous trailers on the market.”
FEMA’s trailers have ended up around the country, she said. “I’m getting calls from families all over the country now. Families are getting sick.”
FLUORIDE STORY
Note: This was my preferred headline: Fluoride added to water systems could cause lead poisoning
CBWD operator takes up anti-fluoride fight
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Becky Gillette
It is possible that customers of Carroll Boone Water District may not have fluoride added to their water after all as a result a CBWD contract with Eureka Springs, Berryville, Green Forest and Harrison that forbids the introduction of any corrosive water into distribution systems.
There are concerns that highly corrosive fluoride added to the water could leach lead from distribution pipes, which could cause lead contamination of drinking water, said René Fonseca, a licensed operator with the CBWD.
Lead is a neurotoxin harmful to infants and pregnant women that causes developmental delays in children, damages kidneys and the nervous system and interferes with red blood cell chemistry, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Approximately 250,000 U.S. children 1 to 5 years-old have blood lead levels greater than 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, the level at which CDC recommends public health actions be initiated.
Lead poisoning can affect nearly every system in the body. Because lead poisoning often occurs with no obvious symptoms, it frequently goes unrecognized.
Fonseca said experience in other areas of the country with aging infrastructure has shown that fluoride chemicals added to the water supply can result in extremely high lead levels in children. In 2004, an investigation by the CDC found that 42,000 children in Washington D.C. 16 months-old and younger had blood levels 2.4 times higher than normal.
It could happen here
Fonseca talked to water officials in Washington, D.C. who told him the problem was created when they switched to chloramines for water disinfection, mixing chloramines with fluoridation products that combined to have a corrosive effect on the city’s aging lead pipes. Fonseca said similar problems have been identified in at least three other water districts with lead pipes. His concern is that the same thing could result here from introducing fluoride into CBWD water.
“In aging systems, even with optimal corrosion control in place, it would be a challenge, if not impossible, to prevent the leaching of lead into the water,” Fonseca said. “This is a very important public health issue. Under our contract, I don’t see how they can force us to fluoridate the water.”
The issue is bigger than Eureka Springs or the CBWD. Fonseca said he is concerned about health and welfare of all citizens of Arkansas where waters are fluoridated now or plans are underway to add fluoridation.
The state legislature has mandated fluoride be added to all public water supplies serving more than 5,000 people.The Public Health Service states that fluoridation helps prevent dental decay and is one of the Top Ten public health achievements of the 20th Century.
“Water fluoridation has helped improve the quality of life in the U.S. by reducing pain and suffering related to tooth decay, time lost from school and work, and money spent to restore, remove, or replace decayed teeth,” according to the U.S. Surgeon General. “An economic analysis has determined that in most communities, every $1 invested in fluoridation saves $38 or more in treatment costs.”
We’re not alone
Eureka Springs has twice voted against fluoridation. Opponents of fluoridation say many other cities across the country have stopped fluoridating waters after studies have linked it hypothyroidism, heart disease, learning problems in children and possibly cancer.
There are also concerns the fluoride products added to the water could be contaminated with toxic chemicals. The CBWD, which serves a population of about 25,000, contacted 49 suppliers of fluoride asking for proper American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and NFS60 certification that would list all contaminants by weight, and include information about toxicological studies pertaining to those contaminants. Not one supplier responded to the request for information.
Fonseca said a recent analysis of a random sample of sodium fluorosilicate additive contained 17 trace elements of a toxic nature including lead, arsenic, and thorium, a radionuclide.
Operators are also concerned about how their health would be impacted by exposure from fluoride, which is a hazardous chemical that must be handled with special precautions.
“These are extremely dangerous substances,” Fonseca said. “The acute lethal toxicity of sodium fluorosilicate for an adult man is 6.2 grams, which is about the weight of an average driver’s license. At a water plant the size of CBWD, you would be dumping 150 pounds a day into the water–enough oral doses to poison 9,600 men a day or 297,000 men a month. This is not pharmaceutical grade fluoride, as you would receive in the dental office.
“So today from the Ozark Mountains, let our voice be loud enough to carry to Washington, D.C. to the President of the U.S., the U.S. Congress and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to test and approve fluoride products or forever ban this insidious practice,” Fonseca said. “Water is a life-giving force. Good quality water is a basic necessity for life.”
A lawsuit was filed in 2011 in the Southern District Court of California claims Americans have a constitutional right to not be exposed without their permission to a drug that has never been approved. The lawsuit states that Congress established that the FDA as the only government entity with the authority to approve claims of safety and effectiveness for products intended to treat and prevent disease. Fluoride used in the water industry has never been tested or approved by the FDA.
A new state mandate on water fluoridation requires that funding for equipment to add fluoridation must come from grants and not from taxes or by increasing rates for water district customers. The Delta Dental Foundation has grants available for equipment. But Fonseca said the equipment is only a small part of the cost, as the district would also have to add buildings to house the operation.
Counting the cost
It has been estimated that it will cost CBWD $1.23 million to add the fluoridation equipment and necessary infrastructure. Some legislators have said they were told by lobbyists for fluoridation that the mandate would not cost the taxpayers or increase customers’ water bills.
The Mockingbird Hill Water Association in Boone County has unanimously opposed fluoridation, stating that many of their 300 members are economically depressed.
“We reject this unnecessary mandated cost being shoved down our throat,” said Association President John H. Meyer, who said the board doesn’t want a deadly chemical injected into their drinking water.
Crystal Harvey, state director of Safe Drinking Water for Secure Arkansas, said the water fluoridation mandate bill was rushed through the House and Senate in less than seven working days — hardly enough time to hear from all the citizens in Arkansas against adding a known toxic substance to their water.
In addition to Eureka Springs, Fort Smith and Hot Springs have also opposed adding fluoride to their water system.
“Eureka Springs, Hot Springs and even Fort Smith in its historic areas have those old lead pipes in them,” Harvey said. “When you add fluoride, it leaches lead from those pipes.”
In addition to harming residents, fluoridation of water supplies could also be a deterrent to tourism.
“Hot Springs is known worldwide for its water, and Eureka Springs also has a history of being renowned for the healing quality of its water,” Harvey said. “People may be less likely to come visit if they know that our water could be contaminated with a known accumulative toxic poison. We live in an era of a lot of health-conscious people that want to avoid poisonous chemicals in our food and water.”
Not just humans
Harvey said the rushed passage of this law also prevented discussion of how the mandate could affect animals.
“Most farms that raise livestock have traditionally had wells to provide water to their animals,” she said. “With the expansion of the rural water districts in Arkansas, that has all changed. We have water districts all over the state, especially Northwest Arkansas, that fall under this mandate but the vast majority of the water supplied in these rural areas goes to maintain the lives of chickens, horses and cattle. Now we don’t want anything to happen to our pets, but what about the people or the big corporations in our state that depend on animals for their income?”
Harvey said owners of horses raced at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs might not come to the area if they knew a toxin was intentionally being added to the water could damage their investment to the point that their horses would not be able to race or, worse yet, have to be put down because of fractures.
“If the City of Hot Springs is forced to fluoridate their water system, these thoroughbred horses will be consuming a known toxic substance,” Harvey said.
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Comments
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This is sensationalism at its greatest.
No one must use toothpaste in this town. What do you people think the active ingredient is??
Loudmouthed hippies doing more harm than good.
– Posted by chimps on Wed, Feb 15, 2012, at 7:38 PM
People like Chimps obviously don’t understand science and can only resort to personal insults . Actually, look at the toothpaste tube. You’ll see that poison control must be called if the fluoride is swallowed.
Besides, the fluoride chemicals that are added to water supplies are not pharmaceutical grade. They are waste by-products of the phosphate fertilizer industry and, as this article explains, are allowed to contain trace amounts of very harmful toxins. Hydrofluosilicic acid is collected from smokestacks, trucked as hazardous waste and dumped unpurified into your drinking water.
These chemicals have never been safety tested in animals or humans.
The CDC says that, for children, there is no safe level of lead.
So how does it make sense to add lead-laced fluoride chemicals into these children via the water supply?
– Posted by nyscof on Wed, Feb 15, 2012, at 8:18 PM
It is pure propaganda for the dental groups to claim savings of $38 for each $1 invested in fluoridation.
Even if fluoride was helpful to teeth, distributing any drug in drinking water is the most expensive and wasteful method. As a Civil Engineer, I know that people drink only 1/2% (one-half percent) of the water they use. The remaining 99 ½ % of the water with this toxic fluoride chemical (Hexafluorosilicic acid, which is waste material flushed directly from industrial smokestacks) is dumped directly into the environment through the sewer system. The company CEO would be arrested immediately if they dumped this toxic waste into a river. The only way they can do it legally is to run it through the community water systerm first.
For example, for every $1000 of fluoride chemical added to water, $995 would be directly wasted down the drain in toilets, showers, dishwashers, etc., $5 would be consumed in water by the people, and less than $0.50 (fifty cents) would be consumed by children, the target group for this outdated practice.
That would be comparable to buying one gallon of milk, using six-and-one-half drops of it, and pouring the rest of the gallon in the sink.
Fluoridation surely is in contention as the most wasteful government program. Giving away fluoride tablets free to anyone who wants them would be far cheaper and certainly more ethical, because then we would have the freedom to choose which prescription drug we take.
– Posted by jwillie6 on Thu, Feb 16, 2012, at 12:53 AM
Go to this link to post comments.
http://www.lovelycitizen.com/
From Crystal Harvey
http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/
Misinformed Legislators Pass Unfunded Mandate That Can Jeopardize Animals, Tourism and the Poultry Industry
January 26, 2012 | Author admin
Most folks in Arkansas cherish our animals, whether it be for food, income, or, best of all, as companions. Secure Arkansas believes that we have a right to know what will affect our health as well as what will affect the health of our pets and our livelihoods. In 2011, Mike Beebe, Governor of Arkansas, signed a bill into lawthat requires all districts providing water for over 5000 people to add hydrofluosilicic acid to their water supply. The water fluoridation mandate bill was rushed through the House and Senate in less than 7 working days – hardly enough time to hear from all the citizens in Arkansas that actually voted against adding a known toxic substance to our water.
Because of the rushed passage of this law, there was not any time to consider how this mandate could affect our animals. Most farms that raise livestock have traditionally had wells to provide water to their animals. With the expansion of the rural water districts in Arkansas, that has all changed. We have water districts all over the state, especially Northwest Arkansas, that fall under this mandate but the vast majority of the water supplied in these rural areas goes to maintain the lives of chickens, horses and cattle. Now we don’t want anything to happen to our pets, but what about the people or the big corporations in our state that depend on animals for their income.
Although some of us have a few issues with the way some big corporations conduct business, even Tyson would have to agree, poultry producers are already facing bone issues with their chickens, as seen here in this study, “Factors Regulating Bone Maturity and Strength in Poultry,” by N. C. Rath, G. R. Huff, W. E. Huff, and J. M. Balog, USDA, Agricultural Research Service, Poultry Science Center, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas. I wonder if the chickens used in this study were from the poultry farms in Springdale,AR? Most of these farms use Springdale’s fluoridated water system to raise their chickens. Why wasn’t the content of their water source not considered when examining the reasons for the bone issues of poultry? Will they be seeing more problems when mandatory water fluoridation is implemented all over the state?
Although chickens don’t usually live long enough to show long-term effects of water fluoridation, they do show damage as seen here in this study. Another consideration is how the poultry affects humans after it ends up in the grocery store. (See: Fluoride in drinking water: a scientific review of EPA’s Standards — National Research Council (U.S.) – Committee on Fluoride in Drinking Water) http://books.google.com/
Another important industry in Arkansas is tourism. Since we’re speaking of animals, Oaklawn Park, in Hot Springs comes to mind. How do you think the owners of these very expensive horses would feel if they knew a substance being added to the water could damage their investment to the point that their horses would not be able to race or, worse yet, have to be put down because of fractures. If the city of Hot Springs is forced to fluoridate their water system, these thoroughbred horses will be consuming a know toxic substance. Shown on this link is a letter written by Dr. Richard Sauerheber (B.A. Biology, Ph.D. Chemistry, University of California, San Diego) to then Governor Schwarzenegger, over his concerns for the California horse-racing industry as it pertains to water fluoridation.
But what about the horses that are used for riding, horse shows and personal pleasure? Meet Cathy and Wayne Justus of Pagosa Springs, Colorado who experienced incredible debilitating symptoms in their world class quarter horses and their dogs with seemingly no source or reason. After the death of Cathy’s prize horse, the local veterinarian tested for every known possibility for the cause but could not come up with an explanation. It was not until Dr. Lennart Krook, Professor Emeritus of Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine, tested for fluoride toxicity that they knew for certain what was killing their horses. They had been poisoned by fluoride in their drinking water. Quote from Justus, “I have the sad distinction of owning the first horses to ever be diagnosed with chronic fluoride poisoning from artificially fluoridated municipal water. I have this distinction, not because it hasn’t been happening for years all over this world, but because vets, like doctors and dentists, are not taught in their schooling the science and biochemistry of fluoride and what it does to the body. I know of this lack of training of proven science because I have made it a point, over the last 25 years, to talk to hundreds of these professionals. We have now lost 8 horses and 4 dogs to this virulent cumulative toxin. This was scientifically proven by the world’s authority of fluoride poisoning at Cornell University in New York.” See the rest of her amazing letter here.
You can also view Cathy Justus’ very personal story with pictures of her champion quarter horses, studies, and related videos at her personal MySpace page.
An excellent documentary of the Justus’ heartbreaking story can be seen on YouTube.