Another fact is that 90% of the fluoridation product that is used is hazardous industrial fluoride wastes from phosphate fertilizer plants. It is whatever pollution is captured from the stacks by air pollution control equipment on any given day, laced with some aluminum, some arsenic and some polonium-210 a radioactive element that is naturally found in phosphate rock.
People are already getting too much fluoride in the food supply because it is found in the insecticide cryolite and in the water used in food processing. People are often getting much fluoride exposure from fluoride toothpaste where it is used to poison the bacteria (both harmful and beneficial ones) that are in the mouth. Few people know that in the 1930s sodium fluoride, the usual active ingredient in fluoride toothpastes, was used mainly as a cockroach poison and a rat poison. Do the commercials of Crest and Colgate tell you to brush your teeth with rat poison? Do parents watching their kids brushing their teeth tell their children not to swallow the rat poison?
For that matter, does your local friendly water district let you know that they are adding hazardous industrial fluoride wastes to your drinking water? Is it commercially honest to continue to tell customers that this added product is effective in reducing tooth decay and is perfectly safe even for children and for pregnant women, when actually it is not? When is the media going to stop advertising fluoridated products and repeating governmental agency/industry lies and start educating the public with the scientific facts?
In the US, media coverage of Judge Chen’s verdict has been widespread, and it has ranged from excellent to mediocre to mind-scrambling. Perhaps the most important article is the one written by Mike Stobbe for the Associated Press, which accurately told of Judge Chen’s opinion concluding that fluoride added to the water poses an unreasonable risk but then describes as being “another striking dissent to a practice [fluoridation] that has been hailed as one of the greatest public health achievements of the last century.”
He then adds “Fluoride strengthens teeth and reduces cavities by replacing minerals lost during normal wear and tear, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” His article is typical of the mainstream news coverage in that it mixes fact with propaganda, leaving the reader with no clear sense of what the judge’s verdict is telling us and a sense of the scandal that it implies.
Further, the breaking story of the fluoride verdict was blown off of the front pages by the disaster of a hurricane that jumped from the Florida coast to five inland states and caused unprecedented flooding. Coverage was further blown away by the dramatic coverage of escalating conflict in the Middle East.
This was great timing for those who would want to obscure an uncovered fluoridation scandal.
Don’t wait for the EPA to make the change
The Fluoride Action Network (FAN) was the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, and it provided a lead attorney, Michael Connett, whose knowledge of the science as well as law made him standout in representing the plaintiffs.
FAN’s leaders are telling their followers not to wait for the EPA to bring about the end of water fluoridation. Use the momentum of this victory, they say, to call for an end to fluoridation in every town and city that has it.
Bring the issue back to every one of the dozen or so states that have (unwisely) mandated water fluoridation statewide; get them to repeal their fluoridation mandate.
There is some evidence that an avalanche of change may be already starting to happen. Abilene Texas has announced that it will immediately stop water fluoridation. Water supervisors in Yorktown and Somers, two neighboring towns just north of New York City, have announced they want to halt fluoridation in order to protect children. Davis County, in northern Utah with population over 360,000 has announced that the addition of fluoride to their drinking water will be “paused.”
Vigorous discussions are taking place in many other places as responsible officials are given the judge’s strongly worded opinion and details of what the science on fluoride actually says.