EPA Pressured To Stop Addition Of Fluoride In Drinking Water
By Peak Johnson
Fluoride continues to be a hot-button issue across the country.
Just last year, large sections of San Jose, CA, began using fluoride in drinking water. The decision came several years after a huge push by dentists and the Santa Clara County Public Health Department, among others. According to NBC Bay Area, in December 230,000 people in East San Jose, Almaden Valley, and Santa Teresa began receiving fluoridated water.
Meanwhile, The Alabama Supreme Court ruled in December that a Marshall County water system can cease fluoridating its water over issues that the practice is not deemed healthy. In August of last year, the city of Arab’s water system stopped fluoridating its water after looking over studies that stated that using the chemical posed a potential health threat. However, just a few months later, the Arab City Council ordered the system to restart the fluoridation.
According to Collective Evolution, the Fluoride Action Network (FAN) is “among a coalition of environmental, medical, and health groups now urging the [U.S. EPA] to ban the addition of fluoride to public drinking water supplies.”
A petition presented to the EPA has over 2,500 pages of scientific documentation that show the effects of water fluoridation to human health.
The petition states that “the amount of fluoride now regularly consumed by millions of Americans in fluoridated areas exceeds the doses repeatedly linked to IQ loss and other neurotoxic effects; with certain subpopulations standing at elevated risk of harm, including infants, young children, elderly populations and those with dietary deficiencies, renal impairment and/or genetic predispositions.”
Under what is known as the Toxic Substances Control Act, the EPA can cease “the use of a chemical that may possess risks to the general public, as well as vulnerable populations.”
The petition also said that “since there is little benefit in swallowing fluoride, there is little justification in exposing the public to any risk of fluoride neurotoxicity, particularly via a source as essential to human sustenance as the public drinking water and the many processed foods and beverages made therefrom.”
The EPA requested that the evidence be looked over by the National Research Council.
Collective Evolution reported that “there has been an overwhelming amount of research revealing the dangers of fluoride on human exposure, including research published in Lancet Neurology classifying fluoride as one of 12 chemicals known to cause developmental neurotoxicity in humans.”
Harvard researchers also revealed in 2012 that children exposed to fluoride in drinking water had lower IQs.