Health Spectator

On Tuesday, August 30 actress and activist Daryl Hanna was arrested in front of the White House for sitting in against the Keystone XL oil pipeline. That pipeline, if built, would transport oil from Alberta, Canada’s tar sands fields to Texas at the Gulf of Mexico.

What does that have to do with our health? you might ask. Indeed, that is a logical question.

First, the oil in question is extremely dirty crude oil. Its carbon content is exceedingly high. In fact, tar sands oil produces 82 percent more greenhouse gas than conventional crude oil. So not only is it much more expensive to convert to, say, gasoline than conventional crude, it also has a far worse effect on the environment even if it doesn’t spill.

But when it spills, it spells disaster. Residents of Michigan can tell you about that. An existing pipeline extends from these same oil fields to refineries in Oklahoma. Now barely a year old, that pipeline has leaked twelve times in twelve months. In July 2010 it spilled one million gallons of tar sands crude into a Kalamazoo River tributary. Forty miles of river are still contaminated with the oil more than a year later. In part, that’s because tar sand sinks in water. Of course, it still coats and kills fish and wildfowl.

So if you don’t want crude oil contaminating your waterways and drinking water or excess carbon, sulfur and mercury polluting your air and soil, there must be cleaner energy alternatives. Or maybe we just have to cut back on our use of energy and our miles of driving, perhaps using electric cars (which still require us to produce that electricity in the first place—we know).

But that soil, air and water pollution don’t really affect us, right? Breast cancer is still on the rise wordwide. Of course, that’s because of “Western” lifestyles, right? According to the World Health Organization (WHO) there will be 20 million new cases of cancer per year by 2030, up from 12 million new cases in  2008. But if the cause were simply our Western lifestyle as so much of the media assure us, shouldn’t the cancer rate reach a steady state, at least in the U.S.? How do we blame a continuing increase in cancer rates worldwide on our Western lifestyle? Has life changed that radically in India and Southeast Asia?

Incidentally, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) reports that the current increase in cancer translates into approximately 56% more cancer in men and 22% more cancer in women over the course of a single generation. The NCI reports that one in two men or women will experience cancer in their lifetime. And it expects the cancer rate to double by 2050. In Ireland, a report just out states that cancer cases have risen 50% since the 1990s. Has Ireland become that much more “Westernized” since 1990?

If this is purely the result of a Western lifestyle, which presumably means inadequate exercise and a diet of processed foods, why do the rates keep rising? Once one does not exercise and one’s diet consists entirely of processed food—which is, unfortunately, the case for many of us—how can you justify further increases in cancer?

The only explanation, we believe, is a continuing deterioration in our environment, with subsequent ill effects on our health. And the  Keystone XL pipeline is one more giant step in that direction.

We’ve grown accustomed to seeing those signs on the local buses that say, “Powered by Clean Natural Gas.” It always gave us a bit of a lift to see that cheerful improvement touted, even knowing that the buses in this area sporting that sign hold fewer seats than the older buses and are less comfortable for travel.

Still… just the price of progress and greenness, we always thought.

Never again. After seeing Josh Fox’s Gasland, we cannot view natural gas (or any fossil fuel, for that matter) in quite the same light. The old natural gas that gushed from an oil well that has just struck a deposit may have been different. Perhaps there are natural gas wells somewhere in this country that are not the result of fracking—hydraulic fracturing—and which we can still view benignly. But we now know that the odds favor fracking as the likely source of natural gas, as fracking wells spread across our national landscape like locusts or the plague.

Josh Fox hails from Pennsylvania (as we do) and happened to be one of those apparently lucky people who received a lease in the mail from a natural gas company. All he had to do was sign the lease in order to receive a check for approximately $100,000. Of course, signing that lease would have enabled teams from the natural gas company to come and drill on his parents’s beloved rural homestead, giving Fox pause.

Fortunately for Fox and the rest of us, he decided to do some research before signing on the dotted line. The result was the documentary film Gasland.

Fox discovered that fracking was a process patented by Halliburtion, and its rapid spread is an artifact of the Bush-Cheney administration. That’s because in 2005, Cheney and friends pushed through the Energy Policy Act, which exempted the oil and gas industries from control by the Safe Drinking Water Act as well as from other legislation normally assuring some degree of public safety. For example, Halliburton and those companies actually performing the fracking need not reveal the chemicals injected into underground shale deposits to break loose natural gas.

We suspect that hasty legislation was undertaken because in 2004 a scientist with the EPA (Weston Wilson, a 30-year agency veteran) blew the whistle on the EPA’s hasty approval of fracking under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Initially, fracking was used in the West—where it has done untold damage—and is now working its way eastward, leaving behind a path of devastation. Fracking not only causes natural gas (mostly methane) to exude spontaneously from streams and meadows, wells and water faucets, it also pollutes the ground, water and air with potentially hundreds of deadly poisons, including but not limited to, polyglycols, napthalene, xylene, benzene and toluene. Residents in areas treated with fracking appear to be quite fond of demonstrating that their tap water can be set afire, a sort of dark humor that provides them temporary relief from the daily horrors of living in a fracking zone, which include death and severe illness of family and livestock.

Need we mention that flammable water raises concerns of cancer, neuropathy and endocrine imbalance?

Gasland not only received a special jury prize for documentary film at the Sundance Film Festival 2010 and other coveted prizes, it was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary as well. To add to its mystique, the oil and gas industry lobbied hard to get the Academy to withdraw the film from competition, saying it was full of factual errors. Apparently there were no factual errors of sufficient merit to warrant an attempt to attack the filmmaker via the courts, however.

Take a look at Gasland below, then click here to buy it.

Some of us, no doubt, choose to ignore what’s going on in Japan whether because it’s too much to bear or because we just don’t care. But for the rest of us, whether we are glued to the TV for the latest update or following it at a distance, the ordeal befalling so much of the Japanese population is unspeakably tragic.

And it’s easy to understand how the Japanese people got there. For an island nation with scant natural resources, nuclear energy was the obvious wave of the future. Nuclear energy made them independent of foreign oil–which they desperately needed to power their automobiles, in any case–and harnessed them instead to one of those pursuits the Japanese people do best: technology. So it’s difficult to fault the Japanese for thinking that nuclear power was the obvious solution to their needs.

What were the odds, after all, that an earthquake followed by a tsunami would turn nuclear facilities into seething death traps? Probably quite slender. Yet, as the Japanese and the rest of the world have just found out, those slim odds do come in on occasion, and when they do, the results are devastating. There was a level 9.0 earthquake and it did lead to a tsunami, and the best-conceived power plant technology of 60 years ago has utterly failed. You can’t depend on electrical cooling systems in times of emergency. Nothing less than a foolproof gravity-fed system would have been good enough, and we doubt there is such a thing as a foolproof system anyway. (The plant first to fail, ironically, was built by GE, not by the Japanese.)

But we’re not here to tear apart the promise of nuclear energy. Plenty of others, we suspect, will be doing that in the months to come, though it remains to be seen whether they will be able to alter a national energy policy that is bent on renewing the licenses of numerous American power plants, many of which are leaking radiation and probably in worse shape than the Fukushima nuclear plant was when its recent troubles began.

No, after several days of watching this drama play out in the news (and predicting that we would see a Chernobyl-style disaster or worse before it was over) we were finally struck by a recollection we thought worth sharing. If you are a frequent visitor to these pages, you know our views on fluoride and fluoridation. Despite the propaganda still proffered by the American Dental Association (ADA) fluoride is as certainly detrimental to human and animal health as it is questionable as an aid to dentition.

As Joel Griffiths and Christopher Bryson put it so succinctly in Fluoride, Teeth, and the Atomic Bomb:

Unfortunately, much of the proof of fluoride’s safety rests on the work performed by Program F Scientists at the University of Rochester. During the postwar period that university emerged as the leading academic center for establishing the safety of fluoride, as well as its effectiveness in reducing tooth decay, according to Dental School spokesperson William H. Bowen, MD. The key figure in this research, Bowen said, was Harold C. Hodge—who also became a leading national proponent of fluoridating public drinking water. Program F’s interest in water fluoridation was not just ‘to counteract the local fear of fluoride on the part of residents,’ as Hodge had earlier written. The bomb program needed human studies, as they had needed human studies for plutonium, and adding fluoride to public water supplies provided one opportunity.

Alas, the origin of the whole fluoridation saga in this country (which is–make no mistake–where it all began) was none other than our own Atomic Energy Commission (originally the Manhattan Project, now the Department of Energy, or DOE). The government found that if it was going to pursue nuclear weapons during World War II or, for that matter, nuclear power in peacetime, it would have to overcome one sizable obstacle that overshadowed all others: the toxicity of fluoride, which is used massively in processing uranium. So it ran secret experiments using an unsuspecting public as the guinea pigs. The Manhattan Project had done this with uranium and plutonium and did it as well with fluoride.

Christopher Bryson recounts further in his excellent book, The Fluoride Deception, that Dr. Howard Hodge was assigned to clean up the image of fluoride while he was secretly both the head of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology and head of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR). Writes Bryson,

So, for example, on behalf of the bomb makers he covertly monitored one of the nation’s first public water fluoridation experiments. While the citizens of Newburgh, New York, were told that fluoride would reduce cavities in their children, secretly blood and tissue samples from residents were sent to his atomic laboratory for study.¹

Bryson also notes that “Adding to water a chemical so toxic that it was once used as rat poison was a uniquely American idea and is, increasingly, a lone American practice.”² He then adds, “So if this tale of how fluoride’s public image was privately laundered sounds eerily familiar, maybe it’s because the very same professionals and institutions who told us that fluoride was safe said much the same about lead, asbestos, and DDT or persuaded us to smoke more tobacco.”³

Sad, but true.

We’ve already written about Hodge and his adventures elsewhere in this publication. We suggest you read the account if you haven’t already. You might also read Christopher Bryson’s book as well.

We do not find it reassuring to know that our own federal government was largely behind the deliberate poisoning of our public water supply as a solution to the problem of how to dispose of all the toxic waste produced by the chemical fertilizer industry–the same industry that burgeoned at the end of World War II when the government discovered it had all those munitions factories on its hands producing frightful amounts of nitrate compounds for weapons manufacture. Someone got the bright idea that all that nitrogen-based pollution could be converted to fertilizer. And the industry took off, subsidized by the American taxpayer.

Industry continues to pour out fluoride in massive quantities as toxic waste, which is packaged up as fluorosilic acid—a substance too toxic to be placed in a landfill—and shipped off instead to be poured by municipalities into the public water supply. Through municipal taxes, we fund our own poisoning.

The brains behind all this are the same folks who brought you high-fructose corn syrup (a source of mercury and lead as well as fluoride) for your food and corn ethanol for your automobile’s gas tank. Of course, the fertilizer industry, as we’ve already said, was not alone in producing fluoride as a by-product. Production of aluminum and zinc are other massive sources of the poison. The atomic energy industry used it abundantly in World War II and still does today.

If you’ve read our previous posts on fluoride, you will likely recognize the name of Christopher Bryson. Journalist and author, he wrote The Fluoride Deception. Here in this interview, he gives a good overview of the issues and information you will find in the book.

We first wrote about bisphenol-A (BPA) about two years ago. In that article, we noted that while parents were shying away from plastic baby bottles containing the substance, they were largely unaware that BPA was actually found in larger quantities in most liquid baby formulas because it leaches from the linings of the cans used to package them. Powdered infant formulas, because they needed to be diluted with water, were deemed likely to be a lower source of the substance, but by no means exempt from suspicion.

We recently came across the video below, which does a good job of explaining the dangers and sources of BPA. This substance is of concern not only for infant formulas, but for food packaging and preparation in general, since BPA is used in many plastics used to store and prepare food and beverages, as well as to line all cans sold in the U.S. Since BPA is a serious endocrine disruptor linked to both breast and prostate cancers and is found in the bodies of 93% of the U.S. population, this is bad news for Americans. Any soda you buy—because it will come stored either in a can or a plastic bottle—is likely to be contaminated with the substance. The same follows for virtually any packaged food or beverage, including, for example, canned vegetables. Yet, independent studies performed on BPA even in extremely low doses indicated that the chemical was disruptive to both male and female reproductive systems. It has been linked both to breast and testicular cancer.

This video follows the history of BPA and shows how the EPA has spent millions of taxpayer dollars earmarked for screening chemicals such as BPA without apparently doing anything. It also interviews scientists concerned with this toxic pollutant.

There’s a new report out that says mercury fillings—the so-called “silver” dental amalagam most of us have in our teeth—may not be so harmful after all. Using x-ray analysis, Graham George of the University of Saskatchewan analyzed the surface of mercury-based fillings that were about 20 years old and compared those to the surface of new amalgam fillings.

The old fillings had lost up to 95 percent of their mercury. What’s more, their mercuric composition had changed. While new fillings contain metallic mercury, the old ones contained primarily beta-mercuric sulfide (metacinnabar), according to the paper George and colleagues published in the American Chemical Society journal, Chemical Research in Toxicology in late October.

Over the past week or so, that paper’s conclusions have been finding their way into the scientific press. So maybe those mercury fillings aren’t so toxic after all, the journalists have been saying. At least, not after they’ve been in your mouth for about 20 years.

The only problem is that the harm scientists have been claiming from amalgam fillings comes from the mercury vapors given off by those fillings, not by the direct action of food or saliva against the fillings themselves. Mercury vapor is what put the “mad” in mad hatters, a nineteenth-century reality independent of the writings of Lewis Carroll. Indeed, the primary reason mercury thermometers have become so rare is that if one breaks, despite the low vapor pressure of mercury, the air of a small room such as a bathroom can easily exceed the acceptable limit of the dangerous fumes, even at room temperature. When mercury is heated, the vapors become far more toxic. What’s more, the lungs provide the most efficient path for absorption of mercury.^{1 2 3}

So while we believe the authors of this article had good intentions, we reject the notion that mercury fillings are not harmful. If after 20 years most of the mercury from those fillings is gone, where do you suppose it went? Probably into your body, a substantial portion of it absorbed through your lungs and digestive tract as inhaled fumes.

If you’ve read our previous articles on fluoride—Fluoride message still not getting through and Fluoride still not safe, despite tooth-decay data—you already know most of the information here. However, there is something about seeing the actual authorities speak on camera that makes it all the more convincing and reassuring. Phyllis Mullenix is here, as are Drs. Robert Carton and William Herzy (former president and current vice president of the EPA Union, respectively) and Arvid Carlsson (Nobel Laureate in Medicine), as well as other scientific and governmental luminaries too numerous to mention.

Yes, fluoride does cause brain and skeletal damage. Yes, it is harmful to the thyroid and pineal glands. And our children are getting overdosed with it. And yes, as we reported before, it is a toxic waste that’s being disposed of in our water supplies at some additional local expense.

It’s all here. A must-view:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7547385139152764985

Editorial

former CDC head Dr. Julie Gerberding

We came across a post on the autism site Adventures in Autism by Ginger Taylor claiming that former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) chief Julie Gerberding, who stepped down from that agency in January of this year, has since accepted a position with public relations giant Edelman.

The Edelman website confirms this, and we quote:

Edelman has created the Global Task Force on H1N1 Influenza to help its clients and partners navigate the communications challenges associated with the potential outbreak of H1N1 flu. The task force comprises a network of public health and crisis communications specialists, including former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Julie Gerberding, who are ready to help organizations engage their internal and external stakeholders early and protect their reputations.

Perhaps this is vindication for those Gerberding critics who claimed that while she was head of CDC, her interest was more in protecting careers and reputations than in saving lives. We don’t know.

We do know that the transition back and forth between agencies in the public sector and such major industries as the oil, chemicals, food and pharmaceuticals industries supposedly regulated by those corresponding agencies has been an easy one to make of late, a situation that we find mildly upsetting. We say “mildly” because, while we could easily work ourselves into a sleepless frenzy over this, it happens all the time. That would leave us sleepless for life were we to agonize over it too much.

Gerberding has every right to represent the same large pharmaceutical companies she was accused of representing all along, and at least now her paycheck does not come directly from our taxes. (It is siphoned off, instead, via the extra healthcare costs we pay for healthcare we may or may not receive, depending upon our ability to pay for it after having supported with our taxes massive government agencies that are supposed to be guarding us. For more on these issues see the interview with a CIGNA exec and Michael Moore’s Sicko.)

Corporate vs. public interests

We wouldn’t mind the job security conferred upon the ruling elite by these arrangements nearly so much if only those public servants were more diligent in their defense of the public (as opposed to corporate) interests while serving their brief tenure in public posts. But so few of them have actually been able to switch off the defending-corporate-interests part of their personalities while allegedly serving the public.

If you read Ginger Taylor’s references to Gerberding it becomes clear that she feels intense frustration at Gerberding’s frequent calls for more research that were then followed by total inaction in instigating such research.

Taylor, meanwhile, is a Maine housewife living the daily frustration and horror of parenting a child disabled by autism. It is one thing to sit and read countless papers (as we do) trying to decipher the contradictions among research reports to arrive at some sort of informed opinion on the subject and quite another to have witnessed, as Ginger Taylor and too many other parents have, the transformation of a formerly healthy child to a sick and damaged one after receiving a shot or a series of shots.

Cause and effect are total abstractions in the first case and heartless assassins in the second. If you watched your child or spouse regress from a healthy state to an autistic or demented one, wouldn’t you too be bitter or at least hostile towards the vaccine and mercury amalgam manufacturers who continue to claim there is no relation at all between these afflictions and their products?

As for Gerberding, she probably makes the sort of next-door neighbor you would visit with for hours given the opportunity. But we can understand Taylor’s feelings towards her. That frustration comes through in the interview below of Julie Gerberding by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, with text insertions provided by Ginger Taylor. Following that, we have also posted an interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, who has performed extensive research on the thimerosal issue.

Thimerosal and vaccines

Thimerosal, in case you’ve forgotten, is a preservative used in many vaccines. Kennedy’s article Deadly Immunity, published in Rolling Stone and Salon.com is a must read on that subject.

While we’re on the subject of mercury and autism, we would like to add that we don’t think the thimerosal in vaccines (or that in mercury fillings, for that matter) is the sole cause of autism and other apparently mercury-related injuries and illnesses. We do believe that many individuals have been injured by the mercury in vaccinations and in mercury fillings, don’t get us wrong.

But the body is a complex organism and there are often multiple paths to the same result. A lack of vitamin D, for example, might induce similar disorders and certainly does induce asthma, Alzheimer’s and diabetes, to name just three among many. Pregnant mothers and infants have grown increasingly deficient in this important vitamin in recent years (See our piece Vitamin D, the versatile vitamin for more on that.)

Holistic approach works best

But there are other culprits as well. Aluminum not only exacerbates the presence of mercury, but can fill in for it as a damaging agent. Fluoride is another toxin that can cause untold damage, particularly when combined with aluminum. Even monosodium glutamate, aspartame and other excitotoxins may play a role. All these toxins—mercury, aluminum, fluoride, glutamate and aspartame, as well as vitamin D deficiency—have been implicated in the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. They can also cause, in various combinations or singly, childhood-onset disorders such as autism.

For many individuals, the sheer number of vaccinations given to children these days may be the cause. Not only are the additives such as thimerosal cumulative in their effects, the assault on a young immune system that each of these vaccinations represents has to be considered cumulative as well. Then too, the measles antigen suppresses the immune system for up to several months. During this period, another vaccination that might otherwise be tolerated by a given individual may cause disastrous results.

So a holistic approach to this problem works best. For the sake of argument, if you consider health to be the absence of disease and its contributing factors, you could define health, in this context as adequate vitamin D and other vitamins in the absence of mercury, aluminum, aspartame, MSG and fluoride from the diet and the environment.

Start adding any of these toxins back in, and you dramatically increase the risk of any given child displaying autism.

So, while a given parent may witness a child becoming autistic after, say, a flu vaccination (most flu vaccines still contain mercury) that doesn’t mean another parent may not witness either a different result from mercury or a different cause of autism.

The heartbreak of autism

In any case, it certainly does not mean that any of these parents should have to put up with ridicule or indifference on the part of the medical establishment and even less so on the part of our government. And it certainly does not mean that the CDC should continue to allow thimerosal and other forms of mercury to remain in vaccines. Nor should the FDA continue to allow it to be used in tooth fillings, for that matter.

Whereas in Europe the phrase “First, do no harm” is paramount, the United States has developed a different set of standards. Ours is more along the lines of “Do not interfere with business.” The health and welfare of our citizens, sadly, takes a back seat to the profits of corporations.

That situation has got to change.

As the Kennedy interview makes clear, autism is a disease with a well-defined history. It was first described in 1943 by Dr. Leo Kanner of Johns Hopkins University. Kanner had studied 11 children between 1938 and 1943, to which he ascribed this new disease.

Thimerosal was invented in the 1920s and first put into use in vaccines in the 1930s. So those who equate autism with the use of thimerosal have a solid base on which to stand. In fact, the House Government Reform Committee that studied the history of autism and thimerosal concluded in its final report, “This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin.” The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of “institutional malfeasance for self protection” and “misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry.”

You can read all about it here.

We have added the following video (The Truth About Vaccines) from the Shoot ‘Em Up website. The clip can also be found on the Maryland Coalition for Vaccine Choice website. The people who shot the Shoot ‘Em Up documentary from which this video clip is derived produced a feature-length film on the subject. You can purchase that film on DVD from their website. Meanwhile, watch the clip here by clicking on the image below.

Dr. Julie Gerberding Autism interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN – March, 2008, edited by Ginger Taylor.

Below, the Kennedy interview with Joe Scarborough is about Kennedy’s research on autism and thimerosal, a preservative used in many vaccines. This is a subject that both Scarborough and Kennedy know much about. (Scarborough has first-hand experience with autism.)

Keep in mind too that Scarborough is an ultra-conservative, while Kennedy is—well, a Kennedy.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Tuesday announced its decision that mercury amalgam fillings—the so-called “silver” fillings most Americans have in their teeth—contain insufficient mercury to warrant concern.

“While elemental mercury has been associated with adverse health effects at high exposures, the levels released by dental amalgam fillings are not high enough to cause harm in patients,” the FDA website proclaims.

A national group called Moms Against Mercury, along with three other organizations, had sued the FDA in 2006 to have mercury fillings removed from the U.S. market. Later that year, an FDA panel of outside experts voted 13-7 against two statements put to them regarding the FDA’s position that mercury amalgam fillings were safe:

The panel’s rejection of these statements caused quite a flurry among pro-mercury and anti-mercury forces alike. Those opposed to the use of mercury in fillings were heartened that at last the government might be listening. The American Dental Association (ADA), which has long favored the use of mercury fillings and supported the FDA’s position, was stirred to action over the possibility that mercury amalgam might finally be banned.

According to the FDA’s website, Tuesday’s ruling was the FDA’s final word on the subject, to the disappointment of those who were hoping to have mercury banned from dental fillings because of its proven adverse health effects.

Denmark Norway, and Sweden have banned the use of mercury amalgams. Several other countries do not allow the use of mercury fillings in young people under the age of 18.

To see a video entitled “How Mercury Causes Brain Neuron Degeneration” produced by the University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine, click here.

Sometimes we come across pieces in our files that never made it into “print” because they still had a few unfinished paragraphs or sentences, or maybe we just didn’t find time that week to do a final edit, after which it was forgotten. We think of them as orphans. This is one of those that we’ve come back to, finished and updated. We hope you find it useful, if much belated.

We saw it today on our own home page, right at the top of the list of the Reuters news feeds: Many Americans still do not get fluoridated water. The ensuing article quotes Dr. William Bailey of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Oral Health as bemoaning the tragedy that more Americans aren’t getting fluoridated water. Then, further down the list, we found a headline to an article on a related subject that set our hackles on end: US Mayors Agree to Phase Out Bottled Water.

Now don’t get us wrong: we’re no huge fan of bottled water. Yes, we understand that the plastic bottles are not only a huge waste-disposal problem, but generally unhealthy in their own right because of the plastic or its components leaching into the water. And so many of the commercial bottled waters are just bottled tap water sold by the likes of Coke and Pepsi anyway. (The worst of these are highly fluoridated as well.)

So we think of the American obsession with buying bottles of water as—well, misguided. It’s just one of the many things we’ve been brainwashed into doing by the corporate media. Watch enough television, and you’ll start buying bottled water too. And don’t get us started about the current practice of putting flavorings and sugar in the water and calling it a “sports drink.” (Yeah, right!)

However, one of the reasons we hate to say goodbye to bottled water is that it is the only way many Americans can get water that isn’t fluoridated, although the proposal to require fluoridation of bottled water has been put on the table.

So we couldn’t help but wax cynical when we read the following statement in the first-mentioned Reuters article about fluoridated water:

Asked if there is any responsible evidence showing negative health effects due to fluoridated water, Bailey said, “No, not at the levels that we use in community water systems.”

This statement is misleading and irresponsible. (more…)