Fluoridation Chemicals Endanger Workers

New Book: "Fluoride Phosphates Toxic Torts," by Gary O. Pittman  

   Gary Pittman gave up his life for his job. 

That wasn’t Gary’s plan when he started working at Occidental Chemical Corporation’s phosphate plants.  He just wanted to make a decent living and provide for his family.  Occidental offered the best pay and best benefits for a high school graduate.

Gary was exposed to 100’s of toxic chemicals with only a hard hat and safety glasses for “protection.” So it’s no surprise that he and many of his co-workers developed debilitating chemical-induced diseases. Most workers were uneducated. Some could barely read and write, Gary says.  They were no match for Occidental’s highly-paid corporate lawyers. But Gary refused to back down and pursued a personal injury lawsuit (toxic tort litigation) against Occidental with several co-workers.

Gary paints a bleak picture of what’s inside the plants – the noise, the smell, the darkness, the boot-eating acids. It’s what you would imagine that Hell would look like, Gary says.

Occidental may have protected themselves legally. But ethically, it stinks as badly as the sulfuric acid stench permeating the plants. However, the one deadly chemical all employees were exposed to didn’t have a smell – fluoride – yes, the stuff they put on your teeth and into your drinking water in a failed effort to reduce tooth decay.

   Fluoride, in the form of fluorosilicates or silicon tetrafluoride, is a toxic contaminant of the phosphate rock. These fluorides must be removed to make safe fertilizer and animal feed products.

Gary says, when researchers fed raw powdered fluoride-containing phosphate rock to farm animals, cows’ milk dried up and had high rates of calf stillbirths.   Pigs quit eating and breeding. Chickens died almost instantly.

And to avoid killing animals and plants surrounding the factory, fluorosilicates must be captured or scrubbed out of air emissions. This captured and contaminated waste product is sold unpurified to fluoridating communities.

Gary writes, “When we had to clean the pollution scrubbers, most of us went home with acid burns and coughing up blood.” 

“Once inside those vessels and scrubbers, we had no respirators, and had to breathe that stale, moist acidic air all shift. Sometimes, workers would fall ill with flu-like symptoms, the older workers called it ‘chemical pneumonia,’” writes Gary.

“I remember one time when they assigned me the task of cleaning the filter hood on the pollution scrubber. Powdery fluorosilicate dust was everywhere. As we were cleaning, the dust covered us. It was very hot - 100 to 120 degrees - and we were sweating profusely. When the fluorosilicate dust mixed with the perspiration, it formed acid on the skin and blistered us if we didn't wash it off in time. We were breathing those dusts, too. They didn't give us respirators,” Gary writes.

The pollution scrubbers’ fluorosilicates contain heavy metals such as lead and mercury and radionuclides including radium-226, radon-222 and uranium-238. 

An autopsy of a man who died from several minutes exposure to concentrated fumes at a phosphate fertilizer plant revealed a coating of silica on his lungs. The cause of death, however, was fluorine poisoning, reports Gary.

A dentist speaking at a San Diego City Council meeting, when asked where fluoridation chemicals comes from, answered “from a rock.” He wasn’t lying.  He just didn’t tell the whole truth.

Some fluoridation promoters soften fluorosilicates image by calling them  “co-products” as if the phosphate fertilizer industry made the stuff on purpose. Whatever it’s called, fluorosilicates have never been safety tested in animals or humans.  Yet, it's dumped as is into about 70% of US public drinking water supplies and given a stamp of approval by organized dentistry and its followers.

Gary’s story reveals the horror of working in an industry that provides the chemicals of modern living and how poorly the workers were treated by their employer whose main concern was money. Most of us have no idea how we indirectly put lives in peril. Maybe Gary’s book will get people thinking about it – especially those who endorse, promote or legislate fluorosilicates into our public water supplies. 

Maybe the US phosphate fertilizer industry has improved worker conditions. But now, unbelievably, China, Mexico, Japan and Belgium are selling us their phosphate fertilizer waste fluorosilicates.

China has a history of selling us products with unwanted and/or toxic ingredients. Chinese fluorosilicates have already clogged up water systems in the US.

Organized dentistry, both inside government and out, and the officials they influence have a moral, ethical and maybe legal responsibility to know what toxins are in all fluoridation chemicals, where they come from and whose lives were endangered by handling them. They all need to read this book.

Support Gary's Work:   

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/phosphate-fluorides-toxic-torts/15739397

Dentists Neglect Poor Kids 364 Days a Year

Most dentists neglect low-income Americans all year, except for one “Give-Kids-A-Smile” day, filled with media events, feel-good stories,corporate sponsorship, costly T-shirts, but little drilling and filling. When the media spotlight goes out, so do the dentists. At the same time, organized dentistry fights hard against any viable group willing to alleviate the US dental health epidemic year-round.

Theoretically, government sponsored dental care, under Medicaid, is free for children living in poverty. Sadly, “nationally, only about 10% of all dentists accept Medicaid patients,” according to a report by the Children’s Defense Fund. And over 108 million Americans lack dental insurance, according to the American Dental Association (ADA).

According to American Family Physician, more than three out of four dentists do not treat the uninsured.

Dentists’ income is derived mostly from private insurance and patient’s pockets, says the ADA. Dentists aren’t hurting. Rated among the highest-paying jobs by bizjounrnals.com, the top ten money-making cities for dentists range from Charlotte ($195,540) to Omaha ($176,830).

Meanwhile, 6.5 million children aged 2 through 18 in Medicaid have untreated tooth decay, according to the Government Accounting Office, often forcing them to get expensive hospital emergency care when the decay spreads, the pain is unbearable, costing the taxpayers thousands of dollars to treat. Some have died from untreated tooth decay.

The logical solution is to require dentists to treat more low-income Americans – either for free, for what Medicaid offers, or on a sliding scale. But dentists don't like mandates – well for themselves anyway. They do like fluoridation mandates, though. Dentists prefer to treat the water rather than the individual.

Dentists didn’t make it on their own. Government subsidizes dental tuition and dental schools and regulates their licenses. Dentists need to give back or allow other viable groups to fill the void.

Dental Health Aide Therapists are currently repairing and pulling teeth in rural Alaska where no dentist would live or work. The American Dental Association and the Alaska Dental Society spent $1 million on a lawsuit trying unsuccessfully to stop them.

Organized dentistry now lobbies against solo-practicing dental hygienists, denturists (false teeth makers) from working directly with the public and Dental Therapists in any other state.

Organized dentistry uses its credentials, political clout and deep pockets filled up with corporate cash to lobby our legislators to pass laws that benefit themselves while an oral health epidemic occurs on their watch. See: http://tinyurl.com/PoliticalClout

Unfortunately, organized dentistry uses GKAS day to convince legislators to give them more money to treat Medicaid patients and to promote water fluoridation - a tax-wasting scientfically failed method of reducing tooth decay.

Although the District of Columbia is 100% fluoridated and has the nation’s highest density of dentists, 44% of children in a typical elementary school have cavities in primary teeth – 34% is unfilled. Just 30 dentists (2.5 percent) are Medicaid billing dentists with at least one paid claim, according to “Issue Brief: Oral Health Is Critical to the School Readiness of Children in Washington, DC.”

The Raleigh News & Observer reports, that the ability of patients to pay and the lack of dentists have negatively affected access to dental care and the problem likely will get worse in North Carolina, which is 88% fluoridated About 200 emergency department dental cases occur daily throughout the state, they report.

“Nearly half of [60% fluoridated] Massachusetts children experience tooth decay before third grade…’We struggled over the last several years, particularly in part of the district I represent, which is Cape Cod, to even get any dentists to accept Medicaid patients,’" reports the State House News Service on February 2000.

Rochester, NY, is fluoridated: "Hundreds of local children are ending up in the operation room because of cavities that could have been prevented...The Eastman Dental Center sees more than 300 of these kinds of cases a year. In [fluoridated] Buffalo, 700 plus cases, and thousands state wide [NYS is 73% fluoridated],” according to NBC News

Although Kentucky is 99.8% fluoridated, “Last year, four area hospitals had 1,500 visits from patients seeking help with tooth pain…About a third of those cases involved children and teens, reported the Messenger-Inquirer on March 8, 2008 .

“State officials have found that 4,500 Kentucky 3-year-olds have dental pain each day, McKee said. Nearly half of preschoolers have untreated tooth decay,” they report.

Minnesota is 98% fluoridated: "Last year, there were 22,000 emergency-room visits for dental problems." reported the Star Tribune on January 22, 2009.

In West Virginia, 92% fluoridated, "It's especially difficult to find an oral surgeon who accepts Medicaid patients in Southern West Virginia where dental health problems are rampant,” reports the Charleston Gazette on January 11, 2009.

New York State Department of Health statistics illustrate fluoridation’s inability to equalize cavity rates between low and high socio-economic-status groups, and that fluoridation and tooth decay rates are not inversely related See chart: http://www.freewebs.com/fluoridation/chart.htm

Connecticut mandates fluoridation. Yet 48% of 4-year-olds suffer
untreated cavities partially because 85% of dentists won’t or can’t treat
patients with low-paying government-sponsored insurance, according to Elements of effective action to improve oral health & access to dental care for Connecticut’s children & families.

More evidence of dental needs despite fluoridation http://www.FluorideNews.blogspot.com

What is needed is to train Dental Therapists in this country. The ones working in Alaska were trained for two or three years in New Zealand. They drill, fill and pull teeth as effectively as dentists and have been working for decades in developed countries. As a result, children in New Zealand have no unfilled cavities because they are seen in school by Dental Therapists every year and rural Alaskans aren't pulling their own teeth. Organized dentistry is at odds with public health dentists on this. The former doesn't like any groups infringing upon its lucrative monopoly - even if it means Americans must suffer from dental neglect 364 days a year.

Fluoride in Tap Water a Health Hazard

Even small amounts of fluoride consumed from tap water can damage your bones, teeth, brain, disrupt your thyroid function, lower IQ and/or cause cancer, according to evidence revealed in a groundbreaking 2006 National Research Council (NRC) fluoride report produced by a panel of experts who reviewed hundreds of published fluoride studies.

Fluoridation cheerleaders such as the American Dental Association (ADA) and the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) claim this report has nothing to do with fluoridation (the addition of fluoride chemicals into public water supplies). However, because of the NRC report, both the ADA and CDC now recommend that infant formula NOT be mixed with fluoridated water.

Citing the NRC report, the National Kidney Foundation withdrew its support of fluoridation and replaced it with this warning: “Individuals with CKD [Chronic Kidney Disease] should be notified of the potential risk of fluoride exposure.”

A January 2008 Scientific American article reported that after 3 years of scrutinizing hundreds of studies, the NRC expert panel “concluded that fluoride can subtly alter endocrine function, especially in the thyroid – the gland that produces hormones regulating growth and metabolism,” reports its author Dan Fagin.

Fagin quotes John Doull, professor emeritus of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Kansas Medical Center, who chaired the NRC expert panel: “The thyroid changes do worry me.”

“Many Americans are exposed to fluoride in the ranges associated with thyroid effects, especially for people with iodine deficiency,” said Kathleen Thiessen, PhD, co-author of the government-sponsored NRC report. “The recent decline in iodine intake in the U.S could contribute to increased toxicity of fluoride for some individuals,” says Thiessen. She and at least two other panel members publicly call for an end to water fluoridation.

“A low level of thyroid hormone can increase the risk of cardiac disease, high cholesterol, depression and, in pregnant woman, decreased intelligence of offspring,” said Thiessen.

An analysis of published fluoride/IQ studies e-published 8/10/08 “found a consistent and strong association between the exposure to fluoride and low IQ (published in Biological Trace Element Research el al.).

An Institute for Children’s Environmental Health report published February 2008 and revised July 2008 said "The primary question remains as to whether exposures to fluoride via multiple routes of exposure, from drinking water, food and dental-care products, may result in a high enough cumulative exposure to contribute to developmental effects…(E)merging science suggests we need to further study the dose at which fluoridation may increase risks of neurodevelopment disorders, cancer and skeletal or dental fluorosis, particularly for sensitive individuals."

Over 1,840 professionals signed a statement urging Congress to stop water fluoridation until Congressional hearings are conducted.. See: http://www.fluorideaction.org/statement.august.2007.html

An Online Action Petition to Congress in support of the Professionals' Statement is available on the Fluoride Action Network's web site, http://congress.fluorideaction.net

Organized dentistry and many individual dentists in government and in private practice continue to ignore and/or lie about this extremely scientific NRC report in favor of promoting fluoride. This is beneficial to corporations who financially support dental union groups such as the American Dental Association and its state constituent groups. They have made the American Dental Association into one of the richest and politically powerful lobbying groups in the country which continually legislates for laws that benefits dentists.

Because of the ADA’s money and power, most dentists make three times as much as physicians while working fewer hours and days doing less critical work. They are the rich "guys" contributing to political coffers. However, 80% of dentists refuse to treat Medicaid patients and 108 million Americans don't have dental insurance. People in America are dying from untreated tooth decay.

Fluoridation gives legislators a false fact to fall back upon when asked why they support water fluoridation. The truth is they support the American Dental Association and the fluoride producing corporations who shore up political campaigns to get re-elected. In return, they pass laws favorable to dentists.

The New York Times reported how the NY Dental Society, in effect, buys laws that benefit themselves. (July 16, 2008 editorial “Dental Decay in Albany”)