Bit of News

Another country has banned fluoride. Israel had from July 29, 2013, one year to stop adding fluoride to it water supply. Fluoride is now officially banned.

Fluoride has been mandated to be added to the municipal water supply in Arkansas cities even though the citizens of several of the cities voted against it in past years. Yet, other countries around the world, as well as, many US cities are removing it. Go figure!

Professor Arnon Afek, director-general of the Health Ministry, told the Jerusalem Post:
“Individuals have the right to decide if they want it [fluoride] or not… We cannot force people… The ministry supported it for over 40 years, but this is a new era.
The world has changed, and we can educate parents.”

There is a great deal of research that supports Professor Afek and the decision made by Israel. It is most frustrating for those who do not wish to have it added to their water.  However, those who do not want to drink it, or take a bath or shower in fluoridated water, don’t have a choice if mandated.

In areas that are primarily retirement communities, the situation needs to be evaluated differently. There are scientific studies showing that adults can be affected by the addition of fluoride in the water in various negative ways.

A bit of info for you ladies: It is absorbed through the skin as you soak in the tub which you may not appreciate. Do a little research yourself on the effects of fluoridated water on the skin. It has been found to have an aging effect. It will probably be something you will not want nor will you want it in your children’s bath water, either. Florists have not appreciated it for plants, either, when introduced into water systems.

 

If you wish to have special filters to remove the fluoride, they are available. Visit the page of this website at the page button, Water, at the top of the page. There is some information on that page for you. Do call me if you have any questions.

Fluoride and Cognitive Development:
For years health experts have been unable to agree on whether fluoride in the drinking water may be toxic to the developing human brain. 

In a meta-analysis, researchers from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and China Medical University in Shenyang for the first time combined 27 studies and found strong indications that fluoride may adversely affect cognitive development in children. Based on the findings, the authors say that this risk should not be ignored and that more research on fluoride’s impact on the developing brain is warranted.

Even though many of the studies on children in China differed in many ways or were incomplete, the authors consider the data compilation and joint analysis an important first step in evaluating the potential risk. “For the first time, we have been able to do a comprehensive meta-analysis that has the potential for helping us plan better studies. We want to make sure that cognitive development is considered as a possible target for fluoride toxicity,” Choi said.

Choi and senior author Philippe Grandjean, adjunct professor of environmental health at HSPH, and their colleagues collated the epidemiological studies of children exposed to fluoride from drinking water. The China National Knowledge Infrastructure database also was included to locate studies published in Chinese journals. They then analyzed possible associations with IQ measures in more than 8,000 children of school age; all but one study suggested that high fluoride content in water may negatively affect cognitive development.
The average loss in IQ was reported as a standardized weighted mean difference of 0.45, which would be approximately equivalent to seven IQ points for commonly used IQ scores with a standard deviation of 15.*  Some studies suggested that even slightly increased fluoride exposure could be toxic to the brain. Thus, children in high-fluoride areas had significantly lower IQ scores than those who lived in low-fluoride areas. The children studied were up to 14 years of age, but the investigators speculate that any toxic effect on brain development may have happened earlier and that the brain may not be fully capable of compensating for the toxicity.
“Fluoride seems to fit in with lead, mercury, and other poisons that cause a chemical brain drain,” Grandjean says. “The effect of each toxicant may seem small, but the combined damage on a population scale can be serious, especially because the brain power of the next generation is crucial to all of us.”
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/fluoride-childrens-health-grandjean-choi/
* This sentence was updated on September 5, 2012.

Baths & Your Health:
Most children love to take baths. They will play for quite sometime in a bath. All the while they’re enjoying that lovely warm water, their skin is absorbing what they are sitting in. So, do you know if your child is sitting in a chemical soup or not? It’s a good thing to find out.

Depending on whether a child has eaten, or if there is residual food in the stomach, about 20-50 percent of chemical contaminants are metabolized when foods or beverages are consumed. With dermal exposure and inhalation, however, virtually 100 percent of the contaminants are absorbed directly into the bloodstream.

As one EPA scientist put it, “a shower cubicle can be considered an ‘exposure chamber.’ Exposure to volatile contaminants absorbed via the lung would be about double the same amount from drinking water. In the bath, underarms [axilla], scrotal and vaginal areas, as well as the groin, absorb far greater amounts than in the normal unwashed forearm test.”

The percentages for absorption of parathion are as follows in bathing:

* scalp (32 percent)
* ear canal (46 percent)
* forehead (36 percent)
* plant of foot (13 percent)
* forearm (9 percent)
* palm (12 percent)
* scrotum (100 percent)


Studies done by Brown, Bishop and Rowan in the early 1980s showed that an average of 64 percent of the total dose of waterborne contaminants is absorbed through the skin. A study by British researchers at the Health and Safety Laboratory in Sheffield published in the February 19, 2000 issue of Human Experimental Toxicology suggests that toxicants such as fluorides can be stored in the skin and released over a period of time. The most popular fluoridation agent is fluorosilicic acid, a toxic by-product of phosphate fertilizer production.

On May 10, 1999, US Rep. Ken Calvert, who serves on the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, asked the EPA to answer a simple question: “What chronic toxicity test data are there on sodium fluorosilicate? On hydrofluorosilicic acid?”

A review of nearly 40,000 research papers listed on National Institutes of Health and other U.S. government Internet sites has failed to discover a single study addressing water fluoridation and dermal absorption.

On June 23,1999, EPA Assistant Administrator J. Charles Fox replied that the “EPA was not able to identify chronic studies for these chemicals.”On September 5, 2000, in response to an inquiry from the US House Committee on Science, EPA Assistant Administrator Charles Fox admitted “there are no water quality criteria for fluoride either for the protection of aquatic life or for the protection of human health.”
The EPA earlier confirmed that water fluoridation puts “at risk” 52 million older Americans with calcium, magnesium and vitamin ~ deficiencies. People with cardiovascular and kidney disorders, also, may experience severe “dental fluorosis and skeletal fluorosis” from excessive exposure to fluorides.

The health threat from using fluorosilicates to fluoridate drinking water goes beyond bathing and drinking the treated water. The substances in the fluorosilicates do not magically vanish. All the pollution released from washing clothes and household items, evaporation from clothes dryers and dishwashers remains in the home. Water fluoridated with phosphate scrubber liquor becomes a vehicle to carry hazardous air pollutants directly into your home.

While this secondary contamination of children from fluoridated water is significant, it has never been investigated by the EPA or the US Public Health Service – although both agencies are aware that pollution scrubber liquor is being used to fluoridate municipal water supplies.

A study by British researchers at the Health and Safety Laboratory in Sheffield published in the February 19, 2000 issue of Human Experimental Toxicology suggests that toxicants such as fluorides can be stored in the skin and released over a period of time.

A review of nearly 40,000 research papers listed on National Institutes of Health and other U.S. government Internet sites has failed to discover a single study addressing water fluoridation and dermal absorption.

All dosage recommendations developed by EPA are based on ingestion alone. The EPA and Centers for Disease Control have never commissioned studies on the dermal absorption of fluoridated water and refuse to do so.

Know the water in which your precious children and grandchildren are bathing. If it is city water that has been mandated to have fluoride, then you may wish to consider a whole house purifying system that removes fluoride.

Content contains excerpts from the edited version of a report to the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works on June 13, 2000, and,  Is your bathtub a toxic dump?