Photo: DTI
The fight over whether mercury should be banned from dental restorations in the United States is heating up again and may lead to action by the federal government. During testimony on 14 November before the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Subcommittee on Domestic Policy, opponents of mercury restorations called on the Food and Drug Administration to conduct a formal assessment of the impact that these restorations may have on the environment. “The dental industry should embrace a clean hands policy and stop its mercury pollution from getting onto American’s dinner plates,” longtime mercury opponent Michael Bender, director of the Mercury Policy Project, charged, saying that dental mercury is contaminating the environment at levels far greater than previously thought.
Bender told the subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, that evidence now shows dental mercury reaches the air through municipal waste incineration and cremation at more than five times the level previously estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency. “Dental mercury is getting into our environment and into the food we eat,” he warned the subcommittee. “Now that we know that, it’s time for dentists to stop perpetrating their mercury on the public, and for FDA to require that they all take appropriate precautions.”
Pierre Larose, DDS, president of the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, testified that many dentists are already moving away from mercury. “Amalgam use is declining rapidly in favor of more aesthetically pleasing alternatives that seem to represent a considerably lower environmental problem, and therefore a lower risk to public health,” Larose said. “Several good alternatives to amalgam are currently available to dentists. Together they cover all the indications.”
Charles G. Brown, national counsel, Consumers for Dental Choice, demanded to know why the Food and Drug Administration has not finalized a rule proposed in 2002 to classify mercury tooth fillings under its regulations governing medical devices. Although “silver” fillings, which are actually around half mercury, have been used for 150 years, the government has never subjected them to a formal review as a medical device.
“FDA will now have to answer to Congress for its years of stonewalling in favour of mercury-silver fillings,” Brown charges. “FDA has so far refused to do an environmental impact statement on the impact of dental mercury, which is horrible for the environment and human health, or even to warn pregnant women and nursing mothers about the threat to their babies. In the unkindest cut of all, FDA continues to allow mercury fillings on the market even though it admitted five times to a federal court in February that it doesn’t know whether these fillings are safe or unsafe.”
Dental releases from clinics are the largest source of mercury going to municipal wastewater treatment plants in the US, Bender and Brown charge. This mercury can become airborne when municipal sewage sludge is incinerated and when dead people are cremated. Between 25 and 34 tons of mercury are used each year in mercury-based dental restorations, and half of all mercury still used in commerce, around 1,000 tons, is in dental patients’ mouths.
House subcommittee members Diane Watson (D-Calif.) and Dan Burton (R-Ind.) called for the hearing. Last May, they reintroducing legislation to phase out mercury from dental restorations.
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