Where Does Fluoride Come From? New York State Coalition Opposed to
Fluoridation
April 22, 2004
Many dentists and most of the public are
unaware their fluoride-laced glass of water is actually spiked
with an impure industrial waste product (fluosilicic acid),
"scrubbed" from Florida phosphate fertilizer smokestacks.
The filtering was forced by successful lawsuits against
fluoride-emitting industries for cattle and crop damage; but
the residue also provided a cheap fluoride source critical for
the war effort (WWII) as well as for water fluoridation .
According to investigative reporter, Christopher Bryson, in
his new book "The Fluoride Deception", fluoride is an
essential component of atomic bomb production and was declared
a 'strategic and critical' material by the government after
World War II, With fluospar, the usual fluoride source, in
short supply, they turned to Florida's phosphate industry to
recover the industry's captured fluoride. Florida held the
world's largest geological deposits of natural phosphate which
contain 3 - 4% fluoride.
"In a sweetheart deal these phosphate companies are spared the
expense of disposing of this 'fluosilicic acid' in a toxic
waste dump. Instead, the acid is sold to municipalities,
shipped in rubber-lined tanker trucks to reservoirs across
North America and injected into drinking water for the
reduction of cavities in children. (So toxic are the contents
of the fluoride trucks that, in the aftermath of the September
11, 2001, terrorist attack, authorities were alerted to keep a
watchful eye on road shipments of the children's tooth-decay
reducer.)" writes Bryson in his heavily referenced book. In
return, U.S. strategic planners would have a nearly
inexhaustible potential supply of domestic fluoride.
There was yet another potential cold-war reason for disposing
of fluosilicic acid in public water supplies. The Florida
phosphate beds were also an important source of uranium,
harvested for the Atomic Energy Commission. Because uranium is
only a trace mineral in the phosphate deposits, enormous
quantities had to be processed to glean worthwhile amounts of
uranium. So, large amounts of waste fluoride were also
produced. Permitting that fluoride to be dumped into public
water supplies - rather than being disposed of as toxic waste
- reduced the cost of such uranium extraction and provided a
supply of fluoride.
Skeptical at first Theo Colborn, coauthor of "Our Stolen
Future," senior scientist with the World Wildlife Fund-US, and
one of the world's leading authorities on environmental
endocrine-disrupting chemicals writes in the forward to "The
Fluoride Deception,"
"Bryson writes with the skill of a top-selling novelist, but
it was not his convincing storytelling that made me finish the
book. It was the haunting message that possibly here again was
another therapeutic agent, fluoride, that had not been
thoroughly studied before it was foisted on the public as a
panacea to protect or improve health."
"Whether or not Bryson's nuclear-bomb connection is ever
confirmed without a doubt, this book demonstrates that there
is still much that needs to be considered about the continued
use of fluorine in future production and technology. The
nuclear product that required the use of fluorine ultimately
killed 65,000 people outright in one sortie over Japan. The
actual number of others since then and in generations to come
who will have had their health insidiously undermined by
artificial exposure to fluorides and other fluorine chemicals
with half-lives estimated in geologic time may well exceed
that of the atom bomb victims millions and millions of times
over," writes Colborn.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency confirms fluoridation
is a fix for Florida's environmental pollution in a 1983
letter stating "This Agency regards such use as an ideal
environmental solution to a long standing problem? By
recovering by-product fluosilicic acid from fertilizer
manufacturing, water and air pollution are minimized and water
utilities have a low-cost source of fluoride available to
them."
There is no dispute among those for and against water
fluoridation that industrial waste fluorosilicates are
dispensed via the water supply as a cavity-preventive.
Industry may have solved their toxic waste problems. But the
evidence shows fluoridation does not reduce tooth decay. A
tooth decay epidemic is rampant in the U.S. today, reports the
Surgeon General and cavity crises are occurring in many, if
not all, fluoridated cities and states.
Further, these fertilizer by-products have never been safety
tested in animals or humans. The National Toxicology Program (NTP)
has just begun to study these water fluoridation chemicals.
Masters and Coplan, in their published studies, consistently
find higher blood lead levels in children who live in
silicofluoridated communities when compared to those living in
sodium or non-fluoridated communities.
Newburgh, New York was the first experimental city to dose its
citizens with fluoride, in 1945, to conduct safety studies.
Planned to last ten years, the study was curtailed after five
years, and declared a success. Children sick two weeks before
examination were excluded - eliminating the very children who
might be exhibiting fluoride's adverse effects and no adults
were studied.
Oh, and they used sodium fluoride, not the fluoride chemicals
used by over 91% of U.S. fluoridating communities today -
silicofluorides.
