That Fluoride Added to Your Town Water to ‘Prevent Cavities?’ The EPA Says It’s Hazardous Waste

🧵- Story by @ChildrensHD

After Utah last month became the first state to ban water fluoridation, local water managers now face a dilemma: How should they dispose of the remaining fluoride?

Mainstream media, dental associations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and other proponents of water fluoridation repeatedly state that the “miracle mineral” fluoride is a “naturally occurring” mineral.

But the fluoride added to town water supplies is far from natural.

Naturally occurring fluoride is calcium fluoride. The fluoride added to water is the byproduct of phosphate fertilizer production, sold off by chemical companies to local water departments across the country.

The byproduct comes in the form of hydrofluorosilicic acid, which is used by most large cities to fluoridate their water.

Hydrofluorosilicic acid is considered a hazardous substance and must be disposed of following strict environmental regulations under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.

Scott Paxman, general manager of the Weber Basin Conservancy District, which provides water to over 700,000 Utah residents, told The Defender that he reached out to the state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to inquire about fluoride disposal.

DEQ told Paxman that once the May 7 deadline to end fluoridation in Utah kicks in, any water districts that still have fluoride in their facilities will be subject to regulation as generators of hazardous waste — requiring them to follow an expensive and time-consuming set of regulatory requirements to get rid of their hydrofluorosilicic acid.

Paxman said he was outraged that his water conservancy district would be classified as a hazardous waste generator. “We aren’t hazardous waste generators,” he said. “We are just middlemen.”

He said that for years, water operators in Utah had been raising concerns about the hazards of the acid that they saw firsthand in their facilities and the health risks they and the public faced from fluoride exposure.

Water operators like Paxman were active in the campaign to end fluoridation in Utah, he said. Now they were not getting the guidance they needed to dispose of the chemicals. ‘They have no idea how toxic this stuff is’

Paxman said DEQ’s first suggestion was that the water districts run out the fluoride by stepping up the feed rates of fluoride into the water. The agency pointed out that they could go as high as 4 milligrams per liter (mg/L) — which is the current maximum contaminant level (MCL) enforceable by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The 4 mg/L maximum contaminant level was challenged in the recent landmark lawsuit against the EPA for failing to appropriately regulate the chemical. The EPA lost, and the judge in the case directed the agency to enact new regulations. The EPA is appealing the ruling.

Four mg/L is the level at which fluoride causes skeletal fluorosis, a debilitating condition that causes skeletal deformities. The judge in the federal lawsuit ruled that at 0.7 mg/L, water fluoridation poses an unreasonable risk to children’s health, because evidence shows it leads to reduced IQ.

Paxman said when he saw that suggestion, he realized, “Oh my God, they have no idea what they are talking about. They have no idea how toxic this stuff is.”

Other ideas floated by DEQ included selling the leftover hazardous waste to other states still fluoridating, or returning it to Thatcher Chemical, the industrial chemical distributor that sold them the so-called miracle mineral.

Thread🧵on fluoridation chemicals.

Fluoridation chemicals are the major source of ingested fluoride in the U.S., contributing over 50% of total daily intake at all ages due to the widespread practice of water fluoridation. The fluoride added to municipal tap water systems most often comes in the form of hydrofluosilicic acid (HFSA), a hazardous waste byproduct of phosphate fertilizer production. HFSA is almost always used in large cities that fluoridate their water supplies. In smaller communities, sodium fluoride  or sodium fluorosilicate may be used as the fluoridating agent.

Unlike the fluoride compounds found in toothpaste or supplements, fluoridation chemicals are not pharmaceutical grade quality. They are, instead, unpurified industrial by-products that are collected in the air pollution control systems of certain industries.

Due to the lack of processing, these chemicals are known to contain elevated levels of certain contaminants, particularly arsenic. In addition, recent research — including both epidemiological and laboratory investigations — have detected associations between the fluoridation of water with fluorosilicic acid and elevated lead exposure, particularly those living in houses with old pipes.

Fluoridation chemicals can also greatly contribute to indirect exposures of fluoride, as processed foods and beverages made with fluoridated water in fluoridated communities often make their way into the supply chains of un-fluoridated communities. This mechanism of indirect exposure is called the halo effect.

BIG NEWS - Today, NTP authors published a new article in JAMA Pediatrics detailing their report released in Aug 2024 that concluded fluoride can lower the IQ of children. Today’s article goes further, showing fluoride lowers child IQ at exposures seen in fluoridated communities. FAN’s Executive Director Stuart Cooper said, “The authors combined information from multiple studies to get a more reliable view of the total evidence that isn’t skewed by just one or two outlier studies. This approach is called meta-analysis.

Out of 59 studies, 52 linked higher fluoride levels with lower IQ. The average loss was 7 points.

Reduced IQ was also found in meta-analyses that combined seven high-quality studies having exposures below 1.5 milligrams fluoride per liter of water (mg/L), the range directly relevant to fluoridated areas.

The authors emphasized the finding’s ‘consistency’ and ‘robustness.’

This report gives ammunition to the scores of cities around the country now considering stopping fluoridation.”

What happens when communities end fluoridation?

Here are just a handful of studies and reports to give us an idea.

1. A study of nearly 6,000 children in British Columbia, Canada found that cavity rates declined after ending fluoridation.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11153562/ 2. A study of two towns in Finland that ended fluoridation found that over the next 6 years, decay rates in children either declined or remained the same after discontinuing the practice.

karger.com/Article/Abstra…

Big moment from our #fluoridelawsuit. World-renowned environmental epidemiologist Dr. Philip Grandjean testified at trial that he was bullied by colleagues and higher ups at his university, Harvard, to retract his 2012 conclusions of #neurotoxicity from #fluoride exposure. 2 “Well if you want the whole story, I was asked to meet with a professor from Harvard’s Dental School. He came to my office and essentially threatened me. He said I was endangering public health, and he demanded that I issue a statement similar to what you’re talking about now.”

Here is just some of the published science linking fluoridation to harm:

(Malin, 2018) published in Environment International, researchers reported that exposure to fluoridated water coupled with iodine deficiency in women is linked to hypothyroidism: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30316182/ Peckham, 2015, published in Epidemiology and Community Health found similar results linking fluoridation to hypothyroidism in the UK: jech.bmj.com/content/69/7/6…