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EPA Scientists & Workers Call for an End to
Water Fluoridation Because of Cancer Risk
EPA Unions call for nationwide moratorium
on fluoridation; congressional hearing on adverse effects; youth cancer
cover up.
Eleven Environment Protection Authority (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
Congregational 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
Richard 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, Stephen
Johnson 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 Douglass, 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. Douglass sent the same negative report to the National
Research Council committee studying possible changes in EPA’s drinking water
standards for fluoride.
The unions who signed the letters represent
EPA employees from across the nation, including laboratory scientists in
Ohio, Oklahoma and Michigan, regulatory support scientists and other workers
at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. and science and regulatory workers
in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta and San Francisco.
They are affiliated with the National
Treasury Employees Union, the American Federation of Government Employees,
Engineers and Scientists of California/International Federation of
Professional and Technical Engineers, and the National Association of
Government Employee/Service Employees International Union.
The unions’ letter is online at:
http://nteu280.org/Issues/Fluoride/fluoridesummary.htm
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