Dangers of Fluoridating Drinking Water with fluorosilic acid (H2SiF6)/sodium fluorosilicate (Na2SiF6)
Author: Gary O. Pittman
Rt. 1, Box 85-A
Jennings, FL 32053
November 18, 1998
Dear Congressman or Senator:
I worked in the phosphate fertilizer industry for about twenty-one years. My last position was supervising one-third of the evaporation and purification processes at the Occidental Chemical Corporation, Swift Creek Chemical Complex. That position required a thorough knowledge of almost every facet of producing phosphoric acid for fertilizer and animal feed supplement.
Today, I am disabled and suffer from toxic brain syndrome, emphysema, heart arrhythmias and other health problems due to chemical exposure. Many of my co-workers also suffer from similar illnesses. Of the eight original people in my support group, two are dead from cancers. One man had lung and liver cancer, and the second man died from myeloma (bone cancer); neither man had ever smoked and seldom, if ever, consumed alcoholic beverages according to their wives and friends. Another man has leukemia which is presently in remission. Many of my co-workers have developed brain cancers/tumors and stomach cancers. Myopathy, arthritis, liver dysfunctions, lung problems, symptoms of toxic brain syndrome, etc. are also very common health problems among my co-workers and myself. Toxic brain syndrome and heart problems seem to be the most common problems among the workers. Hamilton County also has the highest rate of cancer in Florida due to pollution from phosphoric acid manufacturing.
The doctors at Shands Hospital, Gainesville, FL (specializing in cancer research and treatment) said that the type of lung and liver cancer one man died from were unidentifiable; they had never seen it before.
You might say that I should be contacting my own U.S. Representative and Senator because this is a regional problem, and it is not in your back yard. However, this is not the case. We were exposed to the same chemicals that the USEPA and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend as fluoridation agents to fluoridate the drinking water for over 100,000,000 people. It is likely that your constituents are consuming the pollution, and you might be drinking it because Washington, D.C. is fluoridated.
Over 50% (now 70%) of the communities in the United States use fluorosilicic acid (H2SiF6) or sodium fluorosilicate (Na2SiF6) to fluoridate drinking water. Neither the USEPA nor U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can provide one safety study proving the product is safe for long-term, low-level consumption. Not one clinical study with animal models has ever been done with the products.
Both fluorosilicic acid (FSA) and sodium fluorosilicate (SFS) are derived from pollution scrubbing operations from phosphoric acid production. The pollution scrubber liquor is a unique product derived from a specific process with unique toxicological characteristics. The presence of chlorides, amines, diesel fuel, kerosene, sulfides, reagents, metals (including arsenic, lead, aluminum, uranium-238 and its decay rate products, etc.), phosphorus and other toxic reactants create a specific product in which FSA is the active ingredient. FSA only comprises about 23% of the total pollution concentrate. It is a highly corrosive acid which can react with most organic and inorganic substances to form many different complex and possibly very toxic fluorides. I state again, not one safety study has been done with these particular products.
There are many factors involved in the creation of the FSA. Once an insight is gained about how the phosphoric acid is made, the FSA becomes even more frightening. Other chemicals are added such as oil based defoamers (possibly containing dioxins), polymers, petroleum products, naphthalene, chlorides, sulfides, Synspar and various reagents. During the phosphoric acid concentration processes, these added chemicals and inherent toxic contaminants common in phosphate rock are boiled off the acid in a partial vacuum at very high temperatures, about 500 degrees F. The vapors from all these chemicals are washed and captured in the pollution scrubbers along with the fluorine and fluorosilicate gases...
NATIONAL TREASURY EMPLOYEES UNION
P.O. BOX 76082
WASHINGTON, DC 20013
May 1, 1999
WHY EPA'S HEADQUARTERS UNION OF SCIENTISTS OPPOSES FLUORIDATION
The following documents why our union, formerly National Federation of Federal Employees Local 2050 and since April 1998 Chapter 280 of the National Treasury Employees Union, took the stand it did opposing fluoridation of drinking water supplies. Our union is comprised of and represents the approximately 1500 scientists, lawyers, engineers and other professional employees at EPA Headquarters here in Washington, D.C.
The union first became interested in this issue rather by accident. Like most Americans, including many physicians and dentists, most of our members had thought that fluoride's only effects were beneficial - reductions in tooth decay, etc. We too believed assurances of safety and effectiveness of water fluoridation.
Then, as EPA was engaged in revising its drinking water standard for fluoride in 1985, an employee came to the union with a complaint: he said he was being forced to write into the regulation a statement to the effect that EPA thought it was alright for children to have "funky" teeth. It was OK, EPA said, because it considered that condition to be only a cosmetic effect, not an adverse health effect. The reason for this EPA position was that it was under political pressure to set its health-based standard for fluoride at 4 mg/liter. At that level, EPA knew that a significant number of children develop moderate to severe dental fluorosis, but since it had deemed the effect as only cosmetic, EPA didn't have to set its health-based standard at a lower level to prevent it.
We tried to settle this ethics issue quietly, within the family, but EPA was unable or unwilling to resist external political pressure, and we took the fight public with a union amicus curiae brief in a lawsuit filed against EPA by a public interest group. The union has published on this initial involvement period in detail.1
Since then our opposition to drinking water fluoridation has grown, based on the scientific literature documenting the increasingly out-of-control exposures to fluoride, the lack of benefit to dental health from ingestion of fluoride and the hazards to human health from such ingestion. These hazards include acute toxic hazard, such as to people with impaired kidney function, as well as chronic toxic hazards of gene mutations, cancer, reproductive effects, neurotoxicity, bone pathology and dental fluorosis. First, a review of recent neurotoxicity research results.
In 1995, Mullenix and co-workers2 showed that rats given fluoride in drinking water at levels that give rise to plasma fluoride concentrations in the range seen in humans suffer neurotoxic effects that vary according to when the rats were given the fluoride - as adult animals, as young animals, or through the placenta before birth. Those exposed before birth were born hyperactive and remained so throughout their lives. Those exposed as young or adult animals displayed depressed activity. Then in 1998, Guan and co-workers3 gave doses similar to those used by the Mullenix research group to try to understand the mechanism(s) underlying the effects seen by the Mullenix group. Guan's group found that several key chemicals in the brain - those that form the membrane of brain cells - were substantially depleted in rats given fluoride, as compared to those who did not get fluoride.
Another 1998 publication by Varner, Jensen and others4 reported on the brain- and kidney damaging effects in rats that were given fluoride in drinking water at the same level deemed "optimal" by pro-fluoridation groups, namely 1 part per million (1 ppm). Even more pronounced damage was seen in animals that got the fluoride in conjunction with aluminum. These results are especially disturbing because of the low dose level of fluoride that shows the toxic effect in rats - rats are more resistant to fluoride than humans. This latter statement is based on Mullenix's finding that it takes substantially more fluoride in the drinking water of rats than of humans to reach the same fluoride level in plasma. It is the level in plasma that determines how much fluoride is "seen" by particular tissues in the body. So when rats get 1 ppm in drinking water, their brains and kidneys are exposed to much less fluoride than humans getting 1 ppm, yet they are experiencing toxic effects. Thus we are compelled to consider the likelihood that humans are experiencing damage to their brains and kidneys at the "optimal" level of 1 ppm.
In support of this concern are results from two epidemiology studies from China5, 6 that show decreases in I.Q. in children who get more fluoride than the control groups of children in each study. These decreases are about 5 to 10 I.Q. points in children aged 8 to 13 years.
Another troubling brain effect has recently surfaced: fluoride's interference with the function of the brain's pineal gland. The pineal gland produces melatonin which, among other roles, mediates the body's internal clock, doing such things as governing the onset of puberty. Jennifer Luke7 has shown that fluoride accumulates in the pineal gland and inhibits its production of melatonin. She showed in test animals that this inhibition causes an earlier onset of sexual maturity, an effect reported in humans as well in 1956, as part of the Kingston/Newburgh study, which is discussed below. In fluoridated Newburgh, young girls experienced earlier onset of menstruation (on average, by six months) than girls in non-fluoridated Kingston.8
From a risk assessment perspective, all these brain effect data are particularly compelling and disturbing because they are convergent.
We looked at the cancer data with alarm as well. There are epidemiology studies that are convergent with whole-animal and single-cell studies (dealing with the cancer hazard), just as the neurotoxicity research just mentioned all points in the same direction. EPA fired the Office of Drinking Water's chief toxicologist, Dr. William Marcus, who also was our local union's treasurer at the time, for refusing to remain silent on the cancer risk issue.9 The judge who heard the lawsuit he brought against EPA over the firing made that finding - that EPA fired him over his fluoride work and not for the phony reason put forward by EPA management at his dismissal. Dr. Marcus won his lawsuit and is again at work at EPA. Documentation is available on request.
The type of cancer of particular concern with fluoride, although not the only type, is osteosarcoma, especially in males. The National Toxicology Program conducted a two-year study10 in which rats and mice were given sodium fluoride in drinking water. The positive result of that study (in which malignancies in tissues other than bone were also observed), particularly in male rats, is convergent with a host of data from tests showing fluoride's ability to cause mutations (a principal "trigger" mechanism for inducing a cell to become cancerous) e.g.11a, b, c, d and data showing increases in osteosarcomas in young men in New Jersey12 , Washington and Iowa13 based on their drinking fluoridated water. It was his analysis, repeated statements about all these and other incriminating cancer data, and his requests for an independent, unbiased evaluation of them that got Dr. Marcus fired.
Bone pathology other than cancer is a concern as well. An excellent review of this issue was published by Diesendorf et al. in 1997.14 Five epidemiology studies have shown a higher rate of hip fractures in fluoridated vs. non-fluoridated communities.15a, b, c, d, e. Crippling skeletal fluorosis was the endpoint used by EPA to set its primary drinking water standard in 1986, and the ethical deficiencies in that standard setting process prompted our union to join the Natural Resources Defense Council in opposing the standard in court, as mentioned above.
Regarding the effectiveness of fluoride in reducing dental cavities, there has not been any double-blind study of fluoride's effectiveness as a caries preventative. There have been many, many small scale, selective publications on this issue that proponents cite to justify fluoridation, but the largest and most comprehensive study, one done by dentists trained by the National Institute of Dental Research, on over 39,000 school children aged 5-17 years, shows no significant differences (in terms of decayed, missing and filled teeth) among caries incidences in fluoridated, non-fluoridated and partially fluoridated communities.16 The latest publication17 on the fifty-year fluoridation experiment in two New York cities, Newburgh and Kingston, shows the same thing. The only significant difference in dental health between the two communities as a whole is that fluoridated Newburgh, N.Y. shows about twice the incidence of dental fluorosis (the first, visible sign of fluoride chronic toxicity) as seen in non-fluoridated Kingston...
Originally posted by TheLieWeLive
reply to post by DimensionalDetective
I have stopped consuming Sodium Fluoride as much as possible. I say as much as possible because I'm sure it can be found in our foods that are processed using water. What about vegetables that absorb large amounts of water? Some people have argued with me that Fluoride is found in nature but it is Calcium Fluoride that is from nature not Sodium. I also stopped using antiperspirant in deodorants. The chemical Aluminum Zirconium can be found in 95 percent of underarm deodorants. The Aluminum helps stops perspiration but it's also absorbs into the body this way. That can't be good.
Originally posted by grimreaper797
reply to post by GoldenFleece
The letter just shows that the guy did not really understand how chemistry worked.
Originally posted by grimreaper797
Fluorine resulting in cancers? Sorry, I don't buy it. Fluorine will bond with calcium and then be absorbed into bones or excreted via urine. It doesn't sit around in the lungs, heart, and brain causing cancers.
Originally posted by GoldenFleece
Based on your comments in this thread, I'm afraid it's YOU who doesn't understand the chemistry of fluoride or how the industrial toxic waste product fluorosilicic acid (FSA) is produced.
Originally posted by GoldenFleece
Spare me the condescending remarks. I have no idea what study you're referring to. Your comments are disjointed and all over the board. I'll make it simple for YOU. Fluoride is a POISON that's more toxic than lead and slightly less than arsenic. It's derived from the pollution scrubbers of phosphate fertilizer plants (FSA) and has NO effect on tooth decay other than destroying numerous essential enzymes in the body.
Originally posted by alaskan_pwner
i don't believe that this is entirely true because in the villages of Alaska most of the squaws have really jacked teeth and decaying but in anchorage were there is fluoride in the water people have not so decayed teeth. why would the "government" or whoever spend money on fluoride to slowly poison people just to make them less educated or slower? if they wanted people dumber there wouldn't be school funding.