Call for an End to Water Fluoridation

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EPA Scientists & Workers Call for an End to Water Fluoridation Because of Cancer Risk

From: Environment News Service <www.ens-newswire.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

EPA UNIONS CALL FOR NATIONWIDE MORATORIUM ON FLUORIDATION, CONGRESSIONAL HEARING ON ADVERSE EFFECTS, YOUTH CANCER COVER UP

WASHINGTON, DC, August 30, 2005 --/WORLD-WIRE/-- 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 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 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 s, 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. s sent the same negative report to the National Research Council committee studying possible changes in EPA's drinking water standards for fluoride.