Subject: Water: Change attitude, Behaviour changes de
CONTENTS (1) INPUT TO HABITAT JAM REGARDING
WATER (2) TIME MAGAZINE ARTICLE, FLUORIDE IN WATER (Thanks to Paule and
Fay) ===================================
(1) INPUT TO HABITAT
JAM REGARDING WATER.
(#2 uses the example of fluoride - it is useful for
pointing out our silliness. Inane behaviour.)
Change attitude,
Behaviour changes
1. Anything upon which our life is dependent for
survival would be sacred, if we are intelligent beings. If we knew in our
hearts, the connection between our very life and water, we would not abuse
this gift. (It is not "a resource", but a gift to be cherished.) If we change
from a Disneyland attitude to one that has a basis in sacred reality, we
could advance toward solutions. North Americans and Europeans need to learn
how to get down on our knees and express gratitude for water.
2. I am
happy to see suggestions for individual collection of rain water (cisterns).
To "treat" all our water, including that which will be "flushed down the
toilet" is not intelligent behaviour.
One little example: When fluoride
is added to a city's water supply, it goes into ALL the water - that which
waters lawns and gardens, flushes toilets, washes clothes and cars, bathes
and showers our bodies, etc. It is much smarter to rely on the fluoride in
toothpaste to get to teeth.
When you look at all the communities that add
fluoride to the water supply, we must be putting one huge pile of it into the
environment.
Time magazine: "fluoride is indisputably toxic; it was once
commonly used in rat poison. . The optimal level of fluoride in water,
according to the Centre for Disease Control, is between 0.7 and 1.2 parts per
million. In 1985 political appointees at the EPA raised the acceptable level
of fluoride in drinking water to 4 p.p.m., over objections from agency
scientists." The world changes, fluoride is in toothpaste, dentists
administer it directly to teeth. Who knows how many ppm's are going into the
bodies of children?
(From Fay) "I'm not sure currently, I believe in l998
the costs were $400,000 just for the chemical in Calgary, not including man
hours etc. It is hard to get a straight answer... I believe uncharted costs
include replacement costs for corrosion of pipes (to homeowners) etc
etc."
Step by step we need to reverse the trend of dumping anything and
everything into the water supply, using it as a toxic dumping ground. In
the words of David Suzuki, "What we do to water, we do to ourselves".
(A large percentage of our bodies is water. We are not separate from
water.)
The use of cisterns is a starting point to the separation of the
water supply, according to its intended end
use.
/Sandra -----------------------------
To participate in
the Habitat Jam: www.habitatjam.com I had a little
trouble at the beginning. What is in front of your face is to enter your
email address and password. BUT before you can do that, you have to
have registered, which is a little box to the
right. ========================
(2) TIME MAGAZINE ARTICLE,
FLUORIDE IN WATER (Thanks to Paule and Fay)
Sunday, Oct.
16, 2005 Not in My Water Supply It hardens teeth and prevents cavities,
but 60 years after it began, fluoridation is meeting new resistance By
MARGOT ROOSEVELT / BELLINGHAM
Somebody put a dead rat in Curtis Smith's
mailbox. Someone else has made anonymous phone calls accusing him of trying
to poison his neighbors. And all around the usually placid university town
of Bellingham, Wash., activists from a group called Citizens
Against Forced Fluoride have planted lawn signs adorned with skull
and crossbones. "I had no idea it would get this intense," says Smith,
70, a retired dentist who is leading a Nov. 8 ballot initiative to
add fluoride to the local drinking water. "These are very angry
people."
Angry indeed: fluoridation to fight tooth decay, a hot-button
issue from the 1950s--when it was attacked as a communist plot--is back
on the front burner and not just in Washington State. Fueled by
health concerns, cancer fears and a grass-roots campaign that has flooded
the Internet with antifluoridation Web pages, citizens across the U.S.
are increasingly suspicious of what the Centers for Disease Control
(CDC) considers "one of the 10 great public-health achievements of the
20th century." In the past three years, legislation to
encourage fluoridation has been defeated or tabled in Oregon, Arkansas,
Nebraska and Hawaii. New battles are brewing in New Jersey, Massachusetts
and across the Canadian border in Montreal.
No one disputes the fact
that fluoride, a natural element found in rocks and groundwater, protects
tooth enamel. Since 1945, municipal systems serving 170 million Americans
have added fluoride (mostly in the form of hydrofluorosilicic acid) to their
water, and the prevalence of cavities in the U.S. has fallen dramatically.
"A community can save about $38 in dental-treatment costs for every
$1 invested in fluoridation," says William Maas, the CDC's director
of oral health. "How many other investments yield that kind of
return?"
But much has changed since 1945, starting with our toothpastes.
Today fluoride is an ingredient in most brands of dentifrice on the
market. Because toothpaste is designed to be spit out, it's a more
efficient way to get the decay-fighting ingredient where it is needed
and nowhere else. Even some dentists, who see firsthand the benefits
of fluoridation, wonder whether people who get fluoride from
toothpaste should get it in their drinking water as well.
What has
also changed is how much toxicologists know about the harmful effects of
fluoride compounds. Ingested in high doses, fluoride is indisputably toxic;
it was once commonly used in rat poison. Hydrogen fluoride is regulated as a
hazardous pollutant in emissions from chemical plants and has been linked to
respiratory illness. Even in toothpaste, sodium fluoride is a health concern.
In 1997 the Food and Drug Administration toughened the warning on every tube
to read, "If more than used for brushing is accidentally swallowed, get
medical help or contact a poison-control center right away."
The most
recent--and controversial--charge links fluoridation with bone cancer. In
June the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a watchdog organization,
petitioned the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to list fluoride in tap
water as a carcinogen. The group cited "decades of peer-review studies" on
fluoride's "ability to mutate DNA and its known deposition on the ends of
growing bones, the site of osteosarcoma"--a rare, often fatal cancer that
affects mainly boys.
Federal health officials view those concerns as
exaggerated. Current standards rely on a 1993 review of published studies by
the National Academy of Sciences, which found "no credible evidence for
an association between fluoride in drinking water and the risk of cancer."
The academy has launched a new review to be released in February.
The
stakes were raised in July when Harvard University opened an investigation
into whether a prominent dentistry professor had suppressed research by one
of his doctoral students in a report to the NIH. The 2001 thesis showed a
sevenfold increased risk of osteosarcoma in preadolescent boys from
fluoridated water. The supervising professor, Chester Douglass, edits a
newsletter funded by Colgate--which makes fluoridated toothpaste--creating
"the appearance of a conflict of interest," according to the EWG, which filed
a charge of "scientific misconduct" with the federal agency. Douglass
was unavailable for comment, but a Harvard spokesman said the
university takes the allegations "seriously."
Meanwhile, unions
representing 7,000 employees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
have waded into the debate. The optimal level of fluoride in water, according
to the CDC, is between 0.7 and 1.2 parts per million. In 1985 political
appointees at the EPA raised the acceptable level of fluoride in drinking
water to 4 p.p.m., over objections from agency scientists. The Natural
Resources Defense Council sued the agency, charging that the safety margin
was inadequate, but in 1987 a U.S. district court ruled that the
EPA administrators had the authority to set fluoride levels. EPA
union representatives reopened the issue in August, calling on
EPA administrator Stephen Johnson to issue a moratorium on
fluoridation and to set a goal of zero fluoride in tap water. "The EPA has
an ethical duty to send an effective warning immediately about
this hazard," they said.
All this makes for a potent mix, especially
when filtered through the Internet, where health-safety concerns tend to get
amplified. Much of the opposition to the fluoridation initiative in
Bellingham comes from people like Lane Weaver, a fire-alarm technician, and
his wife Danelle, a housewife and mother of two. When they first heard
about the issue this summer, the Weavers Googled the word fluoridation.
Nine of the first 10 items that came up were decidedly antifluoride. "I
was horrified," says Danelle. "Why would I want to put a toxic
industrial chemical in my children's bodies?" She joined Citizens Against
Forced Fluoride, and now--with a 6-in.-high stack of scientific
studies gleaned from the Web--she staffs an information booth at the
local farmers' market.
If the risks of water fluoridation are hotly
debated, quantifying its benefits is also tricky. In the 1950s, advocates
claimed a 60% drop in cavities. But with the spread of fluoride toothpastes
and the use of plastic sealants by dentists, decay has plummeted even in
regions where there is little or no fluoride in the water. A 2001 CDC
study found that by the time they were 12, kids in fluoridated
communities averaged only 1.4 fewer cavities than those in non-fluoridated
areas. And even in fluoridated cities, severe decay remains rampant among
the poor--partly because some 85% of dentists, according to state
surveys, reject Medicaid patients. Still, for those with little dental
care, water fluoridation makes a difference, contends Bellingham's
Curtis Smith. "Twenty percent of our kids account for 80% of the
cavities," he says. "With fluoride in the water, they would get a blast
every time they drink."
But in parsing risks, Bellingham is also
weighing an undisputed side effect of ingestion. The CDC recently announced
that 32% of American children now have some form of dental fluorosis, a white
or brown mottling of the teeth. U.S. health officials see it as a
cosmetic issue, largely caused by ill-advised swallowing of toothpaste,
while fluoride critics say it shows that children are accumulating too
much fluoride overall. The World Health Organization sets a
fluoride-safety standard of 1.5 p.p.m.--well below the EPA's 4-p.p.m.
rule--partly to prevent enamel fluorosis. And in Western Europe, where the
drop in tooth decay in recent decades is as sharp as that in the U.S., 17
of 21 countries have either refused or discontinued
fluoridation, contending that fluoride toothpastes offer adequate protection.
(Only Ireland adds fluoride to most of its water systems, while
Switzerland fluoridates its salt.)
Those facts, recycled through
Web-savvy organizations like the Fluoride Action Network, are stirring up
activists. While city councils and water boards tend to fluoridate when they
have the power, the electorate is far more divided. Over the past five years,
the practice was voted down in 38 of 79 referendums, from Modesto,
Calif., to Worcester, Mass. "The Internet is making it light-years
more difficult to fluoridate," says Smith. The Washington State
Dental Association is backing his $300,000 pro-fluoride campaign.
Danelle Weaver and her friends, meanwhile, have raised less than $10,000.
But they are undaunted. "People think we are tinfoil hatters,"
says Weaver, "but we're just average families who take the time to
research and want what's best for our children." That goal is the only
thing both sides seem to
share.
=================================== Email from: Sandra
Finley Saskatoon, SK 306-373-8078 sabest1@sasktel.net
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