| FLUORIDE UPDATE 09/05 |
The Fluoridation issue has come up
again. There is an effort at the Arkansas State level to mandate
water fluoridation statewide.
|
| Thank you to all who responded to previous requests
for help. We still need to continue. Here is the website for this very
important on line petition to support a national moratorium on water
fluoridation. |
|
http://petition.powalliance.org/index.html |
| We, the undersigned, join with members of eleven EPA
unions in their call for an immediate Congressional act placing a
national moratorium on water fluoridation pending a full Congressional
investigation into this public policy, which affects – directly and
indirectly – every resident of the United States. |
| PRESS RELEASE FOR AUGUST 19, 2005 |
| EPA Unions Call for Nationwide Moratorium on
Fluoridation, Congressional Hearing on Adverse Effects, Youth Cancer
Cover Up 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. |
| The unions’ letter is online at
http://nteu280.org/Issues/Fluoride/fluoridesummary.htm |
FOR INFORMATION CONTACT:
Dr. William Hirzy, Vice-President
NTEU Chapter 280
Phone (cell) 202-285-0498 |
