Palo Alto Weekly Newspaper

Wednesday Jul 26, 2000
Letter to the Editor

Reconsider Flouridation

Editor,

Last week the Palo Alto City Council approved Stanford's plan to build a new cancer center. However, it will be several years before it can be utilized by cancer patients. In the meantime we should be mindful of some important statistics.

Dr. Charles Gordon Heyd, past president of the American Medical Association, has warned, "Fluoride is a corrosive poison that will produce serious effects on a long-range basis. Any attempt to use water this way is deplorable." As you may know, Palo Alto has been fluoridated since l952 and Stanford since l970. Please see www.nofluoride.com

In l974, Dr. Dean Burk, retired head of the cytochemistry section of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the United States, organized and gathered data showing a striking association between fluoridation and cancer even at the so-called low dosage of 1milligram per liter. At the time, he was one of the most famous cancer research scientists in the world.

The upshot was that, for Americans who had been drinking fluoridated water (or cooking with it) over the past 15 to 20 years, Dr. Burke showed an excess of over 40,000 cancer deaths in the United States every year due to fluoridation. Can you imagine the health care costs associated with these numbers, not to mention the human tragedy?

On Feb. 14, four citizens, including a doctor, approached the Palo Alto City Council and asked that a reevaluation of our city's fluoridation policy be agendized, just as they are doing in San Francisco--which also has been fluoridated since l952.

In response to the l997 announcement from 1,500 science professionals at the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., who have looked at the epidemiology and toxicology studies nationwide and have come out strongly against water fluoridation, one Palo Alto council member was heard to remark that it was only "activist hype." Denial is a serious problem and hopefully with the new DNA discoveries we can isolate the gene responsible for it.

Home filters do not remove fluoride--to confirm, see your manufacturer's list of removable contaminants. That means fluoride is in your rice, pasta, jello, frozen fruit drinks, ice cubes, coffee, tea, hot chocolate-- everything that you use tap water for at home and meals that you eat in restaurants.

If you think we should agendize and reevaluate this policy, please let your council members know at city_council@city.palo-alto.ca.us . Or call the mayor's office directly.