Can we have a civilized talk about the U.S. water fluoridation industry?

[csziggy]

40. Fluoride is processed from the byproducts of phosphate mines

Unfortunately, the expert who I would have asked about this, my father, has passed away. He was a phosphate mining engineer as was his father, and lived his entire life around the industry. His father's name is on several patents involving the processing of phosphate and my Dad's name is on one which refined the process.

At one point my father obtained a piece of partially mined land in Polk County not far off Hwy 60. He thought it would be a good investment and someday be valuable for development. Since he already owned a couple of orange groves, he thought he'd plant trees on the land as income in the meantime. He bought several small trees ans set the pots out on the land until he got a chance to plant them.

A week later he went out to plant the trees and they were all dead. He took leaves and other samples to the county agent for testing. They were extremely high in fluoride. It seems the fluoride plant across the road was releasing a great deal of the stuff into the atmosphere. Dad was told citrus trees or any crop plants would not survive. He asked about cattle or horses and was told the levels in the grass and soil were too toxic for any grazing animal to survive.

Between 1953 and 1964, however, an estimated 150,000 acres of cattle land were abandoned, and 25,000 acres of citrus groves in the county were damaged. Truck crops were lost, and the commercial gladiolus industry in an adjacent county was blighted. In the seven-year period between 1953 and 1960, the cattle population of Polk County dropped 30,000 head.

“Around 1953 we noticed a change in our cattle. They failed to fleshen as they normally did. We put them in our best pastures and used all known methods to fatten. Worming, mineral drenches, changing pastures did not improve the condition. We watched our cattle become gaunt and starved, their legs became deformed; they lost their teeth. Reproduction fell off and when a cow did have a calf, it was also affected by this malady or was a stillborn.” Thus did a former president of the Polk County Cattlemen’s Association describe the onset of a condition in his cattle that was diagnosed by veterinarians as mass fluoride poisoning. The source of this fluoride poisoning was traced to gas and dust emissions spread by wind from the stacks of the many phosphate-processing plants near the grazing lands and citrus groves.
http://fluoridealert.org/articles/phosphate02/

Dad was stuck with paying taxes on a piece of land he could not make any money on and could not sell.

This was nearly fifty years ago - it was before the Clean Air Act.

Fluorine from the phosphate industry is one example. In the late 1960s the state of Florida passed laws restricting air emissions in part because fluorine from the phosphate industry had begun to harm citrus trees and there were cases of fluorosis in cattle. Since that time phosphate companies have improved the techniques they use to remove contaminants before they are released into the air - such as scrubbing the stacks that processing plants use to release steam. Fluoride is scrubbed from the stack and is either recovered to make fluosilicic acid, which can be sold for uses such as water fluoridation, or is sent to the cooling pond where losses to the air are within regulatory limits.
http://www.fipr.state.fl.us/research-area-public-health.htm