By Rachael Woodhouse
GCN Live.com
As loyal GCN listeners know, the proof is irrefutable that the U.S. population is being deliberately poisoned in myriad ways. Fluoridated water, genetically modified foods, aspartame, high fructose corn syrup, and a host of other slightly lesser evils are chipping away at the health and vitality of the population. Add to this list heavy metal poisoning, and it should concern even the biggest skeptics.
Charles Brown, President of the World Alliance For Mercury-Free Dentistry and the National Council For Consumers For Dental Choice, stopped by INN World Report to chat with GCN talk host Thomas Kiely about the dangers of mercury poisoning.
“Mercury is the most vaporous of the heavy metals,” says Brown. “The child in the inner city has to lick the lead or get just about up to it with his or her tongue to get the lead toxicity. The mercury though is so vaporous; you just have to breathe it. Second, mercury is the most toxic of the heavy metals – more toxic than lead, more toxic than arsenic, the most toxic non-radioactive element on the chart. Third, because mercury is liquid at room temperature… it’s useful. It’s useful for those whose only interest is quick and easy profit and that would be basically about one-half the remaining dentists in this country. Half the dentists, to their great credit, have told the American Dental Association to shove it, and they’ve stopped using mercury fillings. They are mercury-free, and that number is growing. But half the dentists, the ones left, the ones that work run these clinics, these profiteering amalgam clinics in the inner cities and for the army and Indian reservations and the prisoners and Appalachia…are mercury factories.”
A mouthful of heavy metal poisoning.
So just what does ‘mercury amalgam’ mean? How much mercury is really in a mercury amalgam filling? “It’s 50 percent mercury,” Brown explains. “When I say mercury, I’m not talking trace elements. The California dental board said mercury between 43 and 54 percent. So, it’s as much mercury in a filling, in one filling, as is in a thermometer.”
It is important, Brown says, to recognize that the medical world has taken a vastly different stance than the American Dental Association. “Now, realize no hospital in the United States, and increasingly no hospitals in developing countries either, will use a mercury thermometer because they say it could break in a child’s rectum, a person’s mouth, on the floor. It could risk the employee’s health. So the medical profession has said we’d better quit using these huge amounts of mercury.”
Making matters worse, the ADA has full admitted that mercury vapors from amalgams have made their way into the American drinking water supply:
It was estimated that approximately 29.7 tons (26.9 metric tons) of mercury in the form of amalgam are annually discharged to the internal wastewater systems of dental facilities during amalgam placements and removals.
Read the full 2004 study here.
Not surprisingly, the ADA study also placed concern on what the concluded costs of cleanup would be to the industry:
A cost-effectiveness analysis based on these results determined that the annual unit cost to reduce these mercury discharges through the use of amalgam separators would range from $380 million to $1.14 billion per ton.
Mercury is a scientifically acknowledged neurotoxin. It has been linked to conditions ranging from alzheimer’s disease to autism.
Frequency of symptoms from mercury amalgam (silver) fillings
Fortunately, Brown says, there is a solution on the table that is there for the ADA. “We‘ve explained to the ADA there is an easy litigation-free way out…and that is environmental, to say that ‘as good stewards of the environment, we’ve decided to phase out of using mercury amalgam.’” But will they use this idea? “I think I almost had their lawyers talked into it in 2006 at a meeting at the ADA headquarters,” Brown continues. “We were going to keep meeting; we had a framework. After I left, they called me later and said ‘we cannot have a second meeting; we can’t sell it.’” Why not? “You know, there’s a lot of money that people make just having a fight – the lobbyists, the lawyers.”
Unfortunately, the vaporous nature of mercury is a huge problem, one that reaches vast swaths of the population. It’s a problem that the dental industry has been notoriously slow to address, for the usual reasons, according to Brown. “They are giving mercury to children, to pregnant women, to anybody, because it’s such quick and easy profits. You can do it so fast, so if you don’t care about the patient, that is you just want to get the patient in and out of the chair and make the most per chair per day – those dentists are still putting mercury even in children, even in pregnant women, even in people that are already mercury toxic.”
“When a mistake is uncovered, there is still that institutional interest in saying ‘don’t tell anybody’.