Let’s talk about fluoride, since your article on the future of fluoride in KKWWD in the July 10 edition has already initiated the discussion.

Dr. Bill Osmunson, DDS, promoted the use of fluoride for more than 25 years until some of his patients asked him to do more research on this chemical, which they were taking in toothpaste and water. He discovered that if there ever were a benefit to the use of this chemical, which, by the way, is a toxic by-product of the manufacturing of aluminum, steel, fertilizer, glass, cement and coal-burning power plants, he realized that the public was ingesting too much in too many forms.

These fluoride producing companies would normally have to pay dearly to dispose of this chemical if they weren’t able to sell it to municipalities to put in their drinking water. “In other words,” says William Hirzy, a senior EPA scientist, “fluoride that otherwise would be an air and water pollutant is no longer a pollutant as long as it’s poured into your reservoir. The solution to pollution is dilution, and, in this case, the dilution is your drinking water.”

In 1983, Rebecca Hammer, the deputy assistant administrator in EPA’s office of drinking water, called fluoridation “an ideal environmental solution to a long-standing problem.”

Think about it, folks. This is a chemical that really should be intake monitored, and yet, some people drink 8 ounces of water a day and others drink five or six times that amount ”“ with any amount in between. What about the infants and children whose body mass indicates that one glass of water would do more harm than if an adult drank that same one glass? How is that monitoring the chemical intake of a substance like fluoride? You have to understand that the fluoride dumped in our water is not pharmaceutical grade, but a toxic industrial waste product, which is contaminated with lead, arsenic, aluminum and other industrial contaminants.

China, for example, does not allow water fluoridation, because it’s too toxic and causes damage, according to their own studies. Yet, the waste products from their phosphate fertilizer industry is shipped to the United States, where we add it to our water supply.

There have been numerous studies that now link the intake of fluoride with one or more of the following health and mental problems: increase in lead absorption, brain damage and lowered IQ, lower thyroid function, arthritis, bone cancer, increases in tumors and cancer growth, disrupting the immune system, inactivated 62 enzymes, muscle disorders, inhibiting the formation of antibodies, and causing genetic damage. Let’s be honest here. If someone asked you to drink something that had only one of these side effects, would you drink it? Yet, we and our families are drinking something that potentially has all of these side effects.

Mother Nature planned for us to drink fluoride, that’s true, but only that which occurs naturally in our drinking water. Not the toxic chemical that is dumped in our drinking water under the guise of preventing tooth decay.

Carmine Castaldo, North Waterboro