Re: your June 21 editorial, "New fad: Tap water":
It is fine to preach how tap water saves the environment and dollars; however, the fact that drinking tap water subjects us to large amounts of fluoride in the form of the hazardous waste material, fluorosilicic acid, needs to be addressed.
Fluoride amounts in our water supply have been doubled! Many cannot afford the expensive filters that can filter out the fluorosilicic acid the Metropolitan Water District has rammed down our throats. Nicole Johnson, in her May 13 letter, wrote: "Bottom line: The Met was not mandated to fluoridate and, by law, fluoridation costs were not supposed to be passed on to the ratepayers."
In a press release on June 3, the Lillie Center, a Georgia-based health training firm, discusses the National Kidney Foundation's new position paper, "Kidney Foundation Admits: Kidney Patients Should be Notified of Potential Risk from Fluorides and Fluoridated Drinking Water."
This position paper concludes that individuals with chronic kidney disease should be notified of potential risk from exposure to fluorides, and it acknowledges gaping holes in research concerning kidney impacts from fluorides.
Daniel Stockin, a career public health professional at the Lillie Center, states: "Fluoride must be removed from water used for dialysis, but people with kidney stones, transplants, or other kidney issues ingest it in drinking water, foods, drugs and from other sources without anyone knowing their total fluoride dose. Sounds a little like someone's not telling the whole story of Fluoride-Gate."
Stockin adds, "The kidneys are exposed to significant amounts of toxic fluoride as they try to eliminate it from the body. How many kidney patients could have avoided dialysis -- or perhaps, sadly, even death from chronic kidney disease -- if they had been told the whole story about fluoride toxicity?"
Shouldn't this critical information be news?
-- Ellyn Sutton, Simi Valley