EPA Unions Call for Nationwide Moratorium on
Fluoridation, Congressional Hearing on Adverse Effects,
Youth Cancer Cover Up Provided by New
York State Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation
August 25, 2005
Eleven EPA employee unions representing over 7000
environmental and public health professionals of the Civil
Service have called for a moratorium on drinking water
fluoridation programs across the country, and have asked EPA
management to recognize fluoride as posing a serious risk of
causing cancer in people. The unions acted following
revelations of an apparent cover-up of evidence from Harvard
School of Dental Medicine linking fluoridation with elevated
risk of a fatal bone cancer in young boys.
The unions sent letters to key Congressional committees asking
Congress to legislate a moratorium pending a review of all the
science on the risks and benefits of fluoridation. The letters
cited the weight of evidence supporting a classification of
fluoride as a likely human carcinogen, which includes other
epidemiology results similar to those in the Harvard study,
animal studies, and biological reasons why fluoride can
reasonably be expected to cause the bone cancer – osteosarcoma
– seen in young boys and test animals. The unions also pointed
out recent work by Richard Maas of the Environmental Quality
Institute, University of North Carolina that links increases
in lead levels in drinking water systems to use of
silicofluoride fluoridating agents with chloramines
disinfectant.
The letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson asked him to
issue a public warning in the form of an advanced notice of
proposed rulemaking setting the health-based drinking water
standard for fluoride at zero, as it is for all known or
probable human carcinogens, pending a recommendation from a
National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council
committee. That committee’s work is not expected to be done
before 2006.
The unions also asked Congress and EPA’s enforcement office,
or the Department of Justice, to look into reasons why the
Harvard study director, Chester Douglass, failed to report the
seven-fold increased risk seen in the work he oversaw, and
instead wrote to the National Institute of Environmental
Health Sciences, the federal agency that funded the Harvard
study, saying there was no link between fluoridation and
osteosarcoma. Douglass sent the same negative report to the
National Research Council committee studying possible changes
in EPA’s drinking water standards for fluoride.
The unions who signed the letters represent EPA employees from
across the nation, including laboratory scientists in Ohio,
Oklahoma, and Michigan, regulatory support scientists and
other workers at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. and
science and regulatory workers in Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, Atlanta, and San Francisco. They are affiliated
with the National Treasury Employees Union, the American
Federation of Government Employees, Engineers and Scientists
of California/International Federation of Professional and
Technical Engineers, and the National Association of
Government Employee/Service Employees International Union.
