Long Islanders: What you don’t know about fluoride can be hazardous to your health. The remedy: “The Case Against Fluoride” is must-see TV on Altice USA Cable (formerly Cablevision) channel 115 at 8 pm every Tuesday with over 8 different rotating episodes.**
According to the NYS Department of Health, Nassau and Suffolk Counties are newly targeted (slide 5) for fluoridation – the addition of toxin-laced fluoride chemicals into public water supplies – a scientifically indefensible method to reduce tooth decay in tap water drinkers.
“The Case Against Fluoridation” features scientists, doctors and dentists who will tell you why fluoridation is ineffective, harmful, unethical and a waste of money.
According to dentist David Kennedy, past-president of IAOMT (International Academy of Oral Medicine & Toxicology), “By focusing on fluoridation and more modes of fluoride administration instead of diet and dentist-access, organized dentistry allowed a national dental health crisis to occur on its watch and created a new one – dental fluorosis (fluoride discolored teeth). It’s reckless to allow organized dentistry to vouch for fluoride safety. Adverse health effects, outside of the oral cavity from ingested fluoride, are not within the purview of dentistry, according to the California Board of Dental Examiners.”
Even though some local legislators passed laws banning fluoridation, they can’t be complacent. Other states enacted laws to mandate fluoridation to override the power of local fluoridation-rejecting municipalities, e.g. California and Arkansas. And we expect that might happen in New York State.
The NYS Governor’s budget was recently used to create a new law, without going through normal legislative processes, to protect and expand fluoridation ignoring their own State Health Department report indicating fluoridation’s potential harm to kidney patients, diabetics and the fluoride hypersensitive even at optimal levels.
Also buried in the budget is $10 million in fluoridation grants to preserve or instigate fluoridation.
The ease with which these new fluoridation allowances were placed in and passed by otherwise distracted state legislators may give a green light for quietly adding a fluoridation state mandate in a future budget.
All New Yorkers are urged to contact their state and federal legislators to register their opposition to fluoridation here:
A 2014 letter encouraging fluoridation was sent to all NYS Health Commissioners from the NYS Dept of Health indicating “…the expansion of water fluoridation [is] a priority…”
The NYS Dept of Health has already conducted fluoridation spokesperson training all over the state including SUNY- Farmingdale to teach attendees how to lobby in favor of fluoridation.
A Nassau/Suffolk oral health coalition member requirement was that any potential joiner had to take an oath to promote the NYS Dental Plan because it includes fluoridation, to exclude membership to anyone who opposes fluoridation.
Hydrofluosilicic acid, the most-used fluoridation chemical, a lead- and arsenic-laced waste product of phosphate fertilizer manufacturing is not purified before injecting into the public’s water supplies.
Fluoridation began in 1945 with the mistaken belief that ingested fluoride is essential for healthy teeth. Science proved that theory is wrong.
“I never thought this out-dated concept would ever be started in modern times; but I was wrong,” says Carol Kopf who spearheaded the effort that stopped fluoridation in Levittown in 1983 and who now volunteers for both the Fluoride Action Network and the NYS Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation, Inc.
“I’ve learned that politics, not science, supports fluoridation,” says Kopf.
Long Islanders need to know that consuming a fluoride-free diet does not cause tooth decay. But ingesting fluoride can have serious side effects. No human is, or ever was, fluoride-deficient. Our food and beverage supply is saturated with unlabeled fluoride from fluoride-containing pesticide residues and because fluoridated water is used in processing. A USDA fluoride-in-foods database is here.
Most alarming is the never-expected new evidence that fluoride gets into and alters the brain which is only now being studied by the US National Toxicology Program
EPA lists fluoride as having “Substantial Evidence of Developmental Neurotoxicity.”
Long Island’s water supplies already have some serious contamination issues as revealed in testimony presented to a NYS legislative meeting on September 12 in Smithtown. Adding fluoride to this toxic mix is foolhardy at least and deadly at most.
“My testimony is here,” says Kopf
“Lobbied legislators shouldn’t prescribe medicine, deliver it by water engineer and dose it based on thirst and not age, weight, health and need and monitored for complications,” says Kopf.
“We hope Long Island groups and associations will join us in opposing fluoridation. Fluoride is readily available for anyone who believes they need it. Fluoride should be an individual’s choice – not a legislator’s choice,” says Kopf
Long Island has a history of rejecting fluoridation without consequence. Levittown, Carle Place and the towns bordering NYC stopped fluoridation. The Suffolk County legislature rejected their Health Commissioner’s attempt to mandate fluoridation in the 1990’s.
NYS’s own statistics show fluoridation has no relationship to more or less tooth decay and doesn’t close the income disparity gap.
While the nation, which is 2/3 fluoridated, is experiencing a tooth decay epidemic, non-fluoridated Nassau and Suffolk County’s tooth decay rates declined from 50% and 54% in 2004 to 41.9% and 48.7% in 2012, respectively.
**If not an Altice USA subscriber, portions of the series can be seen here:
“The Fluoride Deception and here
“Professional Perspectives on Fluoridation”
Fluoridation 