Hexafluorosilicic acid

Surprising Source of Arsenic in Your Drinking Water—Will EPA Take Steps to Protect Your Health?

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Story at-a-glance

  • While naturally-occurring arsenic in groundwater is one of the most common sources of exposure, hydrofluorosilicic acid (fluoride) added to drinking water is commonly contaminated with toxic arsenic
  • According to recent research, diluted fluorosilic acid adds, on average, about 0.08 ppb of arsenic to your drinking water
  • Low-level chronic exposure to arsenic can lead to a wide variety of health problems, including chronic fatigue, reproductive problems, reduced IQ and other neurological problems, and various cancers
  • As petition urges the EPA to change the source of fluoride in US drinking water, as the most commonly used form, hydrofluorosilicic acid, increases lung and bladder cancer risk
  • Switching from hydrofluorosilicic acid to pharmaceutical-grade fluoride could save the US $1-6 billion annually and prevent an estimated 1,800 cases of lung and bladder cancer

Pure water is one of the most important foundations for optimal health.Unfortunately, most tap water is far from pure, containing a vast array ofdisinfection byproducts, chemicals, heavy metals and even pharmaceutical drugs.Fluoride and arsenic are two prime examples of hazardous water contaminants.

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Not only is the level of arsenic in US tap water high due to natural groundwater contamination,1 the most commonly used form of fluoride added to water supplies also tends to be contaminated with arsenic. As reported by the featured article:2

“In early August, the Environmental Protection Agency is set to decide on a petition to change the source of fluoride in US drinking water.

Currently, the source of fluoride in most public water supplies isfluorosilicic acid, according to government records. The petition calls for the EPA to instead require the use of pharmaceutical-grade sodium fluoride in water fluoridation, which is the addition of fluoride to drinking water for the purpose of preventing cavities.

Fluorosilicic acid is often contaminated with arsenic, and recent research has linked the arsenic from fluorosilicic acid in drinking water to as many as 1,800 extra cases of cancer yearly in the United States…”

The petition3 was submitted by William Hirzy, a chemistry researcher at the American University in Washington, D.C. Hirzy previously worked at the EPA for 27 years.

His team recently published a study entitled: Comparison of hydrofluorosilicic acid and pharmaceutical sodium fluoride as fluoridating agents – a cost-benefit analysis, in the journal Environmental Science & Policy.4

According to their estimation, switching the type of fluoride used to pharmaceutical-grade sodium fluoride would reduce the amount of inorganic arsenic contamination in drinking water by 99 percent!

The Health Dangers of Inorganic Arsenic

Inorganic arsenic is a powerful carcinogen that has been linked to an increased risk of several types of cancer. In 2001 the Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) lowered the maximum level of arsenic permitted in drinking water from 50 ug/L to 10 ug/L (or 10 parts per billion (ppb)) due to the established cancer risk.

The Natural Resources Defense Council5 estimates that as many as 56 million Americans living in 25 states drink water with arsenic at unsafe levels. According to the EPA:6

“Chronic inorganic arsenic exposure is known to be associated with adverse health effects on several systems of the body, but is most known for causing specific types of skin lesions (sores, hyperpigmentation, and other lesions) and increased risks of cancer of the lungs and skin.”

Other impacts of chronic arsenic exposure include, according to the EPA:

Kidney damage and failure Anemia Low blood pressure
Shock Headaches Weakness
Delirium Increased risk of diabetes Adverse liver and respiratory effects, including irritation of mucous membranes
During development, increased incidence of preterm delivery, miscarriage, stillbirths, low birth weight, and infant mortality During childhood, decreased performance in tests of intelligence and long-term memory Skin lesions

Water Fluoridation Chemicals Are NOT Pharmaceutical Grade

While naturally-occurring arsenic in groundwater is one of the most common sources of exposure, hydrofluorosilicic acid—the most commonly used form of fluoride added to water supplies—is a toxic waste product from the phosphate fertilizer industry that is commonly contaminated with arsenic, radionucleotides, aluminum and other industrial contaminants.

According to the featured research, diluted fluorosilic acid adds, on average, about 0.08 ppb of arsenic to your drinking water.

Most people are shocked when they realize that the fluoride added to their water supply is actually a toxic byproduct from the fertilizer industry, opposed to a pharmaceutical-grade chemical. The source of most water fluoridation chemicals is explained by Michael Miller, a minerals commodity specialist for the US Geological Survey, in the featured article:7

“During the production of phosphate fertilizer, phosphate ore is reacted with sulfuric acid to produce toxic gases. These are taken out of the air after being sprayed with water, which produces fluorosilicic acid… The solution is sold to water systems nation-wide, where it is diluted and put into drinking water. Occasionally, it is treated to create sodium fluorosilicate. Together, these compounds (called silicofluorides) provide fluoride to 90 percent of U.S. drinking water systems that are fluoridated…”

Water Fluoridation May Be Placing Infants at Great Risk

Not only is there mounting evidence that fluoride poses grave health risks to infants and children—including reductions in IQ—arsenic exposure in utero and during early childhood is also particularly problematic, as it can cause lasting harm to children’s developing brains, and endocrine- and immune systems.

For example:

  • A 2006 study8 found that Chileans exposed to high levels (peaking at 1,000 ppb) of naturally-occurring arsenic in drinking water in utero and during early childhood had a six times higher lung cancer death rate compared to Chileans living in areas with lower levels of arsenic in their water. And their mortality rate in their 30s and 40s from another form of lung disease was almost 50 times higher than for people without that arsenic exposure.
  • A 2004 study9 showed children exposed to arsenic in drinking water at levels above 5 ppb had lower IQ scores. Earlier studies have linked chronic arsenic exposure to a range of cognitive dysfunctions, including learning disabilities, memory problems, poor concentration, and peripheral and central neuropathies.
  • A study10 published in 2011 examined the long-term effects of low-level exposure on more than 300 rural Texans whose groundwater was estimated to have arsenic at median levels below the federal drinking-water standard. It also found that exposure was related to poor scores in language, memory, and other brain functions.

Is It Worth Increasing Cancer Risk for Minimal, if Any, Benefit to Teeth?

Some proponents of fluoridation believe that the large dilution of these fluoridating chemicals that takes place when they are added at the public water works ameliorates concerns about the known contaminants. However, arsenic is a known human carcinogen, for which there is no safe level.

Inevitably, the addition of contaminated hexafluorosilicic acid to the water supply by definition must increase the cancer rate in the US because of the arsenic it contains, and this is exactly what Hirzy’s research shows. Why would any rational government do that to reduce – at best – a miniscule amount of tooth decay? According to Hirzy:11

“We found that the United States as a society is spending, conservatively speaking, $1 billion to $6 billion treating the excess bladder and lung cancers caused by arsenic in the most commonly used fluoridation chemical, fluorosilicic acid… The switch [to pharmaceutical-grade sodium fluoride] would cost $100 million, but would save billions in reduced cancer costs.”

For people living in areas with fluoridated tap water, fluoride is a part of every glass of water, every bath and shower, and every meal cooked using that water. This makes absolutely no sense considering the carcinogenic nature of arsenic—especially in light of the epidemic of cancer.

Hirzy’s study is actually the first risk assessment of arsenic-contaminated fluoride in drinking water. This is particularly shocking considering the fact that fluorosilicic acids have been used since the early 1950’s12 (prior to that, sodium fluoride, a byproduct of the aluminum industry, was typically used). Incredibly, while the EPA performs risk assessments for most drinking water contaminants, the agency does NOT oversee the addition of fluoridation chemicals. As stated in the featured article, this policy makes no sense whatsoever.

“Under the Toxic Substances Control Act, the EPA has the authority to regulate or ban almost any substance — including fluorosilicic acid — that poses an ‘unreasonable risk’ to public health, [Hirzy] said.”

Appropriations Bill Would Prohibit EPA’s Phase-Out of Sulfuryl Fluoride

While we’re on the topic of fluoride, a related news item13 is worthy of note. Drinking water is not the only source of fluoride, as I’ve discussed previously. Fluoride also enters the human food chain via fluoridated pesticides. According to a recent report, the House of Representatives Appropriations Interior and Environmental subcommittee has voted to approve an appropriations bill that cuts the EPA’s budget by nearly one-third.

What’s worse, the bill specifically prevents the EPA from enforcing its decision to phase out sulfuryl fluoride—a neurotoxic fumigant that has been linked to cancer and neurological-, developmental-, and reproductive damage. If it passes once markups by the Appropriations Committee are completed, it will move to a House vote. According to the news report:

“This is an outrageous attempt to circumvent a basic risk assessment calculation that EPA acknowledges puts the public at risk, given current exposure patterns, to a chemical that is especially hazardous to children.”

In response, Beyond Pesticides, the Environmental Working Group (EWG), and the Fluoride Action Network (FAN) submitted a letter14 to the House Appropriation Committee Chairman and Ranking members, urging them to remove the section in question (section 449) from the bill. You can help by writing or calling your state Representative, asking him or her to uphold the EPA’s ability to protect the health of all Americans by removing this hazardous pesticide from our food production. There’s no need for it, as there are many other viable alternatives, including:

  • Temperature manipulation (heating and cooling)
  • Atmospheric controls (low oxygen and fumigation with carbon dioxide)
  • Biological controls (pheromones, viruses and nematodes)
  • Less toxic chemical controls, such as diatomaceous earth

Water Filtration – A Must for Clean Pure Water…

If you have well water, it would be prudent to have your water tested for arsenic and other contaminants. If you have public water, you can get local drinking water quality reports from the EPA.15

In general, most water supplies contain a number of potentially hazardous contaminants, from fluoride, to drugs and disinfection byproducts (DBP’s), just to name a few. You can get a good idea of what types of contaminants could be in your drinking water right now by viewing this awesome graphic from GOOD Environment16 (reprinted with permission.) It gives you a look at the five most and least polluted water systems in America (in cities with more than 100,000 population), including pointing out the pollutants of largest concern.

I strongly recommend using a high quality water filtration system unless you can verify the purity of your water. To be absolutely certain you are getting the purest water you can, you’ll want to filter the water both at the point of entry and at the point of use. This means filtering all the water that comes into the house, and then filtering again at the kitchen sink. I currently use a whole house carbon-based water filtration system, and prior to this I used reverse osmosis (RO) to purify my water.

You can read more about water filtration in this previous article to help you make a decision about what type of water filtration system will be best for you and your family. Since most water sources are now severely polluted, the issue of water filtration and purification couldn’t be more important.

Ideal Water Sources

Besides purification, I also believe it’s critical to drink living water. I recently interviewed Dr. Gerald Pollack about his book, The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor. This fourth phase of water is referred to as “structured water” and is the type of water found in all of your cells. This water has healing properties, and is naturally created in a variety of ways.

Water from a deep spring is one excellent source of structured water. The deeper the better, as structured water is created under pressure. There’s a great website called FindaSpring.com17 where you can find a natural spring in your area.

But you can also promote structured water through vortexing. I personally drink vortexed water nearly exclusively as I became a big fan of Viktor Schauberger who did much pioneering work on vortexing about a century ago. Dr. Pollack found that by creating a vortex in a glass of water, you’re putting more energy into it, thereby increasing the structure of the water. According to Dr. Pollack, virtually ANY energy put into the water seems to create or build structured water.

My own R&D team is working on a careful study in which we use vortexed water to grow sprouts, to evaluate the vitality and effectiveness of the water. We are conducting extensive internal research to develop the best vortex machine on the market, because we believe an ideal vortexer could be one of the simplest ways to improve people’s health.

Water Fluoridation Is Anything But Safe…

According to Bill Hirzy, water fluoridation remains a government policy because of “institutional inertia [and] embarrassment among government agencies that have been promoting this stuff as safe.” This is probably true, yet it’s shameful that the practice is allowed to continue in the face of overwhelming evidence showing the health hazards of not just fluoride itself, but also of related contaminants such as arsenic.

Clean pure water is a prerequisite to optimal health. Industrial chemicals, drugs and other toxic additives really have no place in our water supplies.

Source: mercola.com

Harvard Study Finds Fluoride Lowers IQ .

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Fluoride is added to 70 percent of U.S. public drinking water supplies to aid in the prevention of cavities.

This benefit is dubious at best, as there is practically no difference in tooth decay rates between fluoridated and non-fluoridated countries, and no difference between states that fluoridate a high versus low percentage of their water.

Yet, while fluoride in drinking water does NOT decrease rates of tooth decay, numerous studies show that this chemical has a wide array of devastating health effects – one of them being lowered IQ.

Yet Another Study Links Fluoride to Lower IQ Levels

A review of brain studies involving the use of fluoride has concluded that one of the adverse effects of fluoride exposure on children is damage to their neurological development.1 According to the Harvard researchers, children who lived in high-fluoride areas had “significantly lower IQ than those in low fluoride areas,” with the authors noting:

“The results support the possibility of an adverse effect of high fluoride exposure on children’s neurodevelopment.“

This just adds to the growing number of animal and human studies demonstrating the damage fluoride inflicts on your brain, including your pineal gland. The results of one study looking at children’s intelligence in two towns – one with fluoridated water and one without – were particularly revealing, with about 28 percent of the children in the low-fluoride area scoring as “bright, normal or higher intelligence” compared to only 8 percent in the high-fluoride area.2

Further, 15 percent of children in the high-fluoride city had signs of mental retardation, compared with only 6 percent in the low-fluoride city. And the study even accounted for other potential variables, such as lead exposure, iodine deficiency or a history of brain disease or head injury. There have been over 23 human studies and 100 animal studies linking fluoride to brain damage. This includes such effects as:3

Reduction in nicotinic acetylcholine receptors Reduction in lipid content Impaired antioxidant defense systems
Damage to the hippocampus Damage to the Purkinje cells Increased uptake of aluminum
Formation of beta-amyloid plaques (the classic brain abnormality in Alzheimer’s disease) Exacerbation of lesions induced by iodine deficiency Accumulation of fluoride in the pineal gland

 

Some of these effects have been observed even at low levels of exposure, such as 1 part per million (ppm) of fluoride in water. This is below the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ‘safe’ drinking water level for fluoride, which is 4 ppm, and right around the levels used in water fluoridation programs, which may range from 0.7-1.2 ppm.

Did you know that the United States is one of only eight countries in the entire developed world that fluoridates more than 50 percent of its water supply? Even China does NOT allow water fluoridation because it’s too toxic and causes damage, according to their studies. Instead, the waste product from their phosphate fertilizer industry is shipped to the United States, where we add it to our water supply!

This is a very important point: the fluoride added to your water is NOT even pharmaceutical grade.

It’s a toxic industrial waste product, which is also contaminated with lead, arsenic, radionucleotides, aluminum and other industrial contaminants. The story gets even more convoluted, as now declassified files of the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission show that the original motivation for promoting fluoride and water fluoridation in the United States was to protect the bomb-, aluminum-, and other fluoride-polluting industries from liability. In the early days some of the sodium fluoride used to fluoridate water supplies in the U.S. came from Alcoa.

A couple of years later, they switched to the even more hazardous waste product hydrofluorosilicic acid from the phosphate fertilizer industry.

While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially claims that “For more than 65 years, water fluoridation has undergone extensive scientific studies and reviews to assess its public health benefits and risks. For many years, panels of experts from different health and scientific fields have provided strong evidence that water fluoridation is safe and effective,”4 this claim appears to have the flimsiest of foundations.

According to a 2006 report from the National Research Council,5 extensive amounts of research are inconclusive, or still missing and need to be conducted to evaluate the whole-body impact of fluoride …

Not only that, but their scientific review also identified research suggesting a variety of harmful effects, from skeletal fluorosis, bone fractures, and, potentially, even cancer. With that in mind, how can the CDC claim that “extensive research” has concluded water fluoridation is safe for ALL community residents, without differentiation between infants and adults, the sick or the healthy?

How can the CDC possibly claim, as they often do, that water fluoridation is one of the top public health achievements of the last century? Fluoride is a toxic agent that is biologically active in the human body where it accumulates in sensitive tissues over time, wreaks havoc with enzymes and produces a number of serious adverse health effects—including neurological and endocrine dysfunctions. So why is it still being added to so much of the U.S. water supply?

Healthy Food – Not Fluoride – Essential for Healthy Teeth

Fluoride’s predominant action is on the surface of your tooth (although even this is now questionable) and not from inside the body – so the idea that many Americans are still being forced to swallow it for their teeth defies all common reason. Good oral health and strong, healthy teeth are NOT the result of drinking fluoridated water and brushing your teeth with fluoridated toothpaste. Rather it’s virtually all about your diet.

Dr. Weston A. Price, who was one of the major nutritional pioneers of all time, completed some of the most extensive research on this topic back in the early 1900s and documented his findings in his classic book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. He found native tribes who were eating their traditional diet had nearly perfect teeth, and were almost 100 percent free of tooth decay — and they did not have toothbrushes, floss, toothpaste, or root canals and fillings.

But when these tribal populations were introduced to sugar and white flour, guess what happened … their health, and their perfect teeth, rapidly deteriorated, just like the kids in El Salvador. By avoiding sugars and processed foods, you prevent the proliferation of the bacteria that cause decay in the first place.

Most people whose diet includes very little sugar and few processed foods have very low rates of tooth decay. So the simple act of limiting, or eliminating sugar, and avoiding processed foods — along with regular cleanings with your natural mercury-free dentist — will ensure that your teeth and gums stay healthy and cavity-free naturally.

Infants and Children Among Those Most at Risk

Breast milk contains very little, almost no, fluoride, and this is by design. Remember, fluoride is a neurodevelopmental toxin that can damage a baby’s brain. As Dr. Paul Connett, co-author of the book, The Case Against Fluoride, explained:

“In the view of many critics of fluoridation, including Arvid Carlsson, Nobel laureate in medicine/physiology, it is reckless to expose infants to levels of fluoride orders of magnitude higher than that found in breast milk.

In the U.S., infants who are fed formula reconstituted with fluoridated tap water receive the highest levels of fluoride (per kilogram bodyweight) in the human population. Specifically, infants who are fed formula made with fluoridated water at the current level of 1 part-per-million (1 ppm = 1 mg/liter) fluoride will receive a dose up to 250 times more than the breastfed infant.

Even with the proposal by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to lower fluoride to 0.7 ppm in fluoridation schemes, bottle-fed infants will still receive up to 175 times more fluoride than the breastfed infant.

… Even though health agencies in the U.S. and other fluoridating countries have recognized that children are being grossly over-exposed to fluoride (41 percent of American children aged 12-15 now have some form of dental fluorosis), they are unwilling to concede that fluoride may be impacting the brain. Their approach has been either to ignore these studies completely or to challenge the relevance and the methodology of the fluoride-brain studies. They have thus far failed to conduct any IQ studies of their own.”

Source: Dr. Mercola