Fluoridation Harms Kidney Patient

Janet Lail learned to live for years with the constant pain she likens to brillo pads rubbed over scorched skin (ouch) and monthly hospitalizations due to a kidney disease (chronic pyelonephritis) that requires she drink loads of water.

Then suddenly the pain disappeared and her hospital visits became fewer and farther between. Even the doctors were confounded-–nothing had changed – except the water-–it was no longer fluoridated.

Lail’s water provider, the South Blount Utility District in Tennessee opened a new plant in June 2004 and started providing unfluoridated water.
Lail told this story to Lesli Bales-Sherrod, a reporter for the Daily Times of Maryville, Tennessee (1)

“`I thought it was a fluke or something,’ (Lail) acknowledged. ‘When you’ve been sick like that for so many years, you don’t want to analyze why (your’re doing better). I didn’t want to talk about it; I was afraid it might go away,’” Bales-Sherrod writes.

Lail is willing to show her medical records to the skeptical. But she probably doesn’t know that the literature is littered with warnings that people with pyelonephritis should avoid fluoride.

But, for some reason, otherwise sensible people trust dentists’ opinions on fluoride’s bodily effects-–as if looking into mouths all day can detect kidney problems.

So legislators follow dentists’ advice and put fluoride into their constituents’ water supplies. Media knight dentists as fluoride experts and write positive fluoride stories, not at all shy to belittle their readers opposed to fluoridation-–a script handed to them by the fluoridationists.


Dentists assure anyone who will listen that, when added to drinking water, fluoride, like a miracle drug, prevents tooth decay with absolutely no harmful effects, except maybe some discolored teeth.

Dentists need to get acquainted with Lail and the scientific literature. It’s well known that fluoride harms kidneys and/or people whose kidneys don’t excrete fluoride properly.

“Kidney patients retain as much as 60% more fluoride than do persons in normal health,” writes physician George Waldbott, the leading medical expert on the clinical aspects of chronic fluoride toxicity when he wrote “Fluoridation the Great Dilemma,” published in 1978 with Harvard educated Albert Burgshthler, Phd, university professor and now Editor of the journal, “Fluoride.”

Waldbott describes two of his patients harmed by fluoridated water.

Twenty-seven year old G.L.’s kidney disease was so bad, she was slated to have her left kidney removed. Additionally, she suffered from pain and numbness in her arms and legs, spastic bowels, mouth ulcers, and headaches.

After, following Waldbott’s advice to avoid the fluoridated water, not only did the above symptoms disappear, but her left kidney began to function again. A five year follow-up found her still healthy.

E. P., 39 years old, had advanced pyelitis (another name for pyelonephritis, Janet Lail’s disease) of the left kidney, bone changes and the same clinical picture as G.L.

E.P.’s diseased kidney and other symptoms improved markedly within six weeks after she stopped drinking her artificially fluoridated water supply.

“One of the most striking features in the early stage of fluorosis is the craving for fluids, accompanied by excess production of urine. Indeed, the more water the patient drinks the thirstier he or she becomes,” writes Waldbott.

Dentists rely on outdated and questionable data to absolve fluoride in kidney problems. For instance Hodge and Smith wrote that “no soft tissue stores fluoride.” We now know that Hodge’s main concern in the 1940’s was to downplay fluoride’s bad effects to protect the super-secret Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bomb that ended World War II.

Hodge knew that fluoride emissions from Manhattan Project contracters were killing and maiming nearby farm crops and animals. (See “The Fluoride Deception” by Christopher Bryson). But stopping the fluoride emissions could kill the project. So instead they downplayed or ignored fluoride’s ill effects.

In 1991 the U.S. government admitted fluoride’s harm. “...subsets of the population may be unusually susceptible to the toxic effects of fluoride and its compounds. These populations include the elderly, people with magnesium deficiency, and people with cardiovascular and kidney problems,” is reported in, the “Toxicological Profile for Fluorides, Hydrogen Fluoride, and Fluorine,” by the U.S. Department of Health (1991).

It was even known in 1965 that fluoride adversely affects people with Lail’s disease.

"A patient with renal disease (probably chronic pyelonephritis) has been reported whose bone contained fluorine in a concentration exceeding 5,000 ppm. There was no history of exposures to fluorides, and her usual drinking water contained less than 0.5 ppm of fluorine. This is of interest because in a postmortem study in Utah the highest concentrations of fluorine were found in those with chronic pyelonephritis… Sauerbrunn and associates have reported in this issue of the ANNALS the development of skeletal fluorosis in a patient with chronic polydipsia [excessive thirst]; the fluorine content of his drinking water was high but it was not at a level generally associated with the production of skeletal disorder. It seems probable that in this patient and in those with chronic pyelonephritis the high concentrations of fluorine found in the bone are the result of a greater consumption of water, which leads to a greater intake of fluorine,” excerpted from the Annals of Internal Medicine 1963 (1)

Two kidney patients, one with pyelonephritis, were unable to excrete fluoride properly which caused bone damaging skeletal fluorosis, researchers reported in 1972 (2).


In persons with advanced bilateral pyelonephritis, the skeletal fluoride content can be 4-fold that of similarly-exposed persons with normal kidneys, reported Marier in 1977 (2a),

Fluoride interferes with calcium to negatively affect kidneys, a 1999 study shows (3)

"As renal function declines, due either to diseases or with aging, plasma and bone fluoride content both increase," according to the Surgeon General’s 1983 committee notes, reports Chemical & Engineering News (4).

The National Kidney Foundation in its "Position Paper on Fluoridation-1980" also expresses concern about fluoride retention in kidney patients. It cautions doctors "to monitor the fluoride intake of patients with chronic renal impairment, but stops short of recommending the use of fluoride-free drinking water for all patients with kidney disease. It does recommend, however, that dialysis patients use fluoride-free water for their treatments. (4)

Studies show that children with moderately impaired renal function (such as those who have diabetes insipidus), are at some risk of skeletal changes from consumption of fluoridated water, even if the fluoride level is no higher than 1 ppm. A number of researchers have found high concentrations of fluoride in the bones of patients who suffer from kidney disease and have found symptoms of skeletal fluorosis in some of these patients. However, there has been no systematic survey of people with impaired kidney function to determine how many actually suffer a degree of skeletal fluorosis that is clearly detrimental to their health.(4)

Fluoridationists may argue that only approximatrely 1 ppm is injected into water supplies. But did dentists calculate how much hydrogen fluoride South Blount customers breathe in from nearby Alcoa aluminum smokestack air emissions? Did they measure how much fluoride is ingested from dental products, foods and beverages other than water?

I doubt it, they seldom do.


The evidence is in. After 60 years of water fluoridation delivered to 2/3 of Americans via the water supply and 100% of Americans via their food and beverage supply, American children are grossly overfluoridated Yet, tooth decay is a national epidemic.

According to the National Kidney Foundation, more than 20 million Americans - one in nine adults - have chronic kidney disease.

The Pot Calls the Kettle Black

Trust me, dentists say, not those anti-fluoridationists with flawed scientific interpretation, fully aware that tagging us as "anti's" is pejorative in itself.

However, U.S. National Institutes of Health scientists were unable to find any valid science to support fluoride's use in preventing tooth decay.(6) and were "disappointed in the overall quality of the clinical data that it reviewed. According to the panel, far too many studies were small, poorly described, or otherwise methodologically flawed" (over 560 studies evaluated fluoride use), according to a news release issued by the Consensus Development Conference on the Diagnosis and Management of Dental Caries Throughout Life, convened by the National Institutes of Health on March 26-28, 2001 in Bethesda, MD.

British scientists have the same problem

"We were unable to discover any reliable good-quality evidence in the fluoridation literature world-wide...An association with water fluoride and other adverse effects ...was not found. However, we felt that not enough was known because the quality of the evidence was poor," according to a news release issued by Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD), University of York, England. (7) In 1999, the UK Department of Health commissioned CRD to conduct a systematic review into the efficacy and safety of the fluoridation of drinking water.


More studies about fluoride’s ill effect on kidney are here http://www.slweb.org/bibliography.html#kidney

Fluoride toxicity symptoms are listed here: http://www.orgsites.com/ny/nyscof/_pgg1.php3

References:

(1) http://www.slweb.org/adams-jowsey.html

(2) http://www.slweb.org/juncos-1972


(2a) http://www.fluorideaction.org/nrc-fluoride.htm#5.8

(3) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=10356089&dopt=Abstract

(4) http://www.fluoridealert.org/s-fluorosis.htm

(5) http://www.thedailytimes.com/sited/story/html/203214

(6) http://consensus.nih.gov/news/releases/115_release.htm

(7)http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/fluoridnew.htm