I don't know if anyone can state for sure what effect mercury dental fillings may have on our health. But why take a chance, even if there is only a remote possibility of problems? Alternatives are available. Composite and porcelain fillings are replacements. When a filling is required on a front tooth, either composite or porcelain material is used, as silver is unsightly.
Interesting, too, is that Sweden banned dental amalgams in 1994. Germany has stopped using most forms containing mercury, and Austria, Denmark and Finland plan to outlaw amalgams. Since 1994 in California, dentists have been required to post a warning in their offices about the hazards of amalgam restorations.
We should all be concerned. Just recently, we learned that women who abandoned estrogen replacement therapy had a significant reduction in reported breast cancer. For years, we were told that this therapy safe.Dentists' aim: Keep mercury out of drains
"We're totally on board," said Dr. Robert Shekitka, president of the approximately 4,700-member New Jersey Dental Association.
The rule proposed by the state Department of Environmental Protection would cover about 3,400 dental facilities in New Jersey. It would remove about 540 pounds of mercury annually from wastewater that flows into sewage treatment plants.
A significant reduction in mercury entering water bodies will eventually lead to lower mercury levels in fish, according to the proposed rule, which was unveiled in September. That, in turn, could lead to relaxed advisories on eating fish with mercury and fishing-related economic benefits.
Dental facilities are the "single-largest unregulated (source) in New Jersey for mercury," said Jim Murphy, supervising environmental engineer in the DEP Bureau of Pretreatment and Residuals.
It would cost billions of dollars to remove mercury at sewage treatment plants versus the $1,000 to $2,000 it might cost to remove mercury at each dental facility, Murphy said.Federal data show that about 90 to 95 percent of the mercury entering sewage plants ends up in sludge, Murphy said. An estimated 5 to 10 percent of the mercury entering plants is discharged into waterways.
About 27 percent of the sewage sludge generated in New Jersey is incinerated, releasing mercury into the air, the rule proposal says. Such mercury ultimately enters surface waters.
Dental facilities, such as private dental practices, hospitals, dental schools and community health centers, are the largest source of mercury entering sewage treatment plants, the proposal says.Todd B. Bates: (732) 643-4237 or tbates@app.com
well..a few thoughts..the ADA says mercury doesn't leak out much, not enough to hurt anyone. in lakes, there would be an accumulative effect, and the mercury would not be secured and amalgamized in the human. i do recommend, however, that humans with mercury fillings do not go swimming in lakes and keep their mouths open, just to be on the safe side of protecting our environment. on a serious note, i believe the ADA and FDA (and congress) is hoping that all people have their mercury fillings replaced (at their own expense, of course) so that no one will have anything to complain about. in fact, i bet they love seeing more and more dentists become mercury-free. after all, the government has so many other special interest groups they support, the mercury industry is dispensable.
Torrie
i really like that alligator analogy; it is right on the money. but, now you all can see why dentists, the ADA, and the FDA get away with putting mercury in fillings. they say there are no tests proving they harm people, none but the Nhanes III Screenings, which I have posted on here. they know it is one of the hardest things to prove because of all the variables and it has had some criticism. Evenso, it has been stated it does show health problems related to amalgams.
there are so many diseases and conditions and pollutants in the world, and mercury affects the immune system and lowers it so that people are suseptible to many different ones. with mercury, one's chances of getting sick goes way up, but if a person has no amalgams, but works at a gas station, or smokes, or uses drugs, or lives near a toxic waste dump, or has a family history of cancer, etc..., etc..., etc..., it would be more difficult to prove a causal link from mercury filling for whatever disease or condition they have. But Nhanes III takes some of the factors into consideration. It was a survey, not a study. here is what the researcher said in an excerpt from the conclusion "If this were a study (and it is not clear exactly how one would go about “studying” how dental amalgam causes illness, as that question has been going on for over 150 years), we would have to perform statistical tricks like removing the effects of age or diet from analysis to see if the statistics change (age becomes an intervening variable if it affects the results). For example people get more fillings as they age, so if you remove the effects of age you remove fillings. At any rate, that is not the intent of this paper, to play games with the most important health survey ever done. The dramatic results in this paper, on the first pass of screening analysis in an area previously unexplored, are strong evidence that dental fillings are the True Intervening Variable. The implications of this report are that current health “studies” are wrong, because dental fillings have never, ever been considered a “variable”. Examples of this would be the Framingham Heart Study, which for 50 years studied 5,000 citizens of Framingham, MA. Dental fillings were simply never looked at or considered a factor in human health."
why is there a debate about mercury and not other heavy metals, you ask? i mean, nowadays if we were to try and make plutonium fillings or even arsenic fillings, people would be outraged because they are proven toxic and deadly. we could promise it didn't leak out (like the mercury proponents did for years until proven otherwise). even if it was found to leak, we could say it isn't enough to hurt anyone (like what has been said). the reason mercury is still allowed is because it was first used so many years ago when the majority of people didn't really know or understand what was going on. evenso, once mercury fillings started killing people and making them sick, doctors were jailed if they used it. There was a period before the ADA formed that it was against the law to use mercury in fillings.
i know toofache doesn't really believe mercury fillings are safe or good, but if there is any question, i would speak to boyd haley about it, as he is our country's leading expert scientist on mercury: http://biological-dentistry.com/custom4.html
Torrie
http://curezone.com/forums/f.asp?f=733
the following excerpts taken from: http://biological-dentistry.com/custom3.html
Cavities in teeth have been filled over the years with a variety of materials: stone chips, turpentine resin, gum, metals.... -Aguste Taveau of Paris, France, developed what was probably the first dental amalgam--in 1816. He used filings from silver coins mixed with mercury. The first dental silver amalgam was introduced by Bell of England in 1819 and later used by Taveau in Paris in 1826. Dr. D.M.Cattell stated that the first dental amalgam introduced into the United States was by the two Crawcour brothers under the name of "Royal Mineral Succedaneum", the last word meaning a substitute or replacer, in 1833.
Back in 1840, dentists formed the American Society of Dental Surgeons. Their members were required to sign pledges that they would NOT use mercury in the fillings they placed. There were even cases in New York in 1848 where dentists were fined for malpractice for using mercury in their filling material. Mercury was referred to as "quicksilver" in North American and in Europe was called "quacksalver" Therefore a "quack" was someone who pretends to cure disease and "salve" was an application for wounds. The term "QUACK" was first applied to anyone using mercury to cure skin diseases, e.g. the skin lesions associated with tertiary syphilis. The skin rash would disappear, but the disease went deeper into the organs and the nervous system and the person died a very painful death. The term was then used against dentists using mercury for the same reason, - using a poisonous substance to "cure" or fix decay. Because of the internal feuds, a new dental organization was formed in 1859, the American Dental Association (ADA). This body did NOT condemn the use of mercury...[and the same mercury fillings are still being used today.] http://www.zhealthinfo.com/dental.htm
[Economics, really]. ...your traditional dentist pays about one dollar for each amalgam he places.... http://www.talkinternational.com/TTCHPTR1.htm
In the coming years,...patients who are harmed by mercury amalgam may begin to bring lawsuits against the dentists who placed toxic substances in their mouths without the patient's knowledge or informed consent and those who purposely concealed facts about the filling's content. .... It's no great stretch, after all, to question whether the ADA has covered up information about amalgam's dangers. As Dr. Huggins says, there's no logical reason for the ADA's refusal to recognize amalgam as a problem. At this point, thousands of patients have responded favorably to its removal. "There's been an active effort to keep the information from getting out," he says. Now the ADA says that mercury vapor from amalgams is released in such minute quantities that is not enough to make anyone sick. As an open minded reader of this article, what conclusions can be drawn from this statement given by dentists (as opposed to medical doctors who specialize in what really makes people sick). A reasonable suggestion is that Liability is what they fear. One estimate is that their exposure could be 5 Trillion (yes, trillion) dollars for amalgam replacements and monetary damages for the sick and injured.
Dr. Huggins, for one, used to spend a great deal of time lecturing to dental associations on the topic of dental amalgam. But then the engagements came to a screeching halt. "I used to lecture 100 days a year to dental groups, and all of a sudden I was told that if I were on a dental program, there would be no postgraduate credit given for that program," he says. "And there's never been an invitation since. Approximately 18 months of bookings were canceled in one week." .... Dr. Sam Ziff, an author and researcher who has studied this topic for years, believes that a political power play is at work, with the issue of legal liability lurking in the background. "I think what they're really hoping for is that the problem will just slowly fade away as more and more of the alternative materials are used and the use of amalgam is stopped" says Ziff. He points to a similar situation that took place in Sweden several years ago. A special commission declared amalgam to be an unsuitable dental filling, says Ziff, but the medical and dental establishment applied political pressure until the commission recanted its statement publicly. When scientists took the commission to task on national television, says Ziff, the Swedish Social Welfare and Health Administration made an historic about-face and supported the original statement against the use of amalgam. As this case illustrates, says Ziff, "There is a lot of political pressure being brought to bear. They've been using it for 150 years, and nobody likes to admit they've been wrong for that long." .... That's exactly what the Swedish agency did, however, when it declared amalgam to be "an unsuitable and toxic dental filling material which shall be discontinued as soon as suitable replacement materials are produced," according to a Swedish newspaper. An official said: We now realize that we have made a mistake. This has caused people to suffer unnecessarily." .... NO! There is not one research article which demonstrates the safety of Dental Amalgam as a Non-Toxic substance!
...many scientists have questioned the continuing use of mercury amalgam or have called for an outright ban on its use. 'There is no safe level of mercury at all,' says Dr. Jay Dooreck. Toxicity experts such as Thomas Clarkson of the University of Rochester Medical School- and Lars Friberg of the Karolinska Institute also argue against the notion of a "safe" level of mercury exposure. ....
I'm just not comfortable somehow with a material (mercury-fillings) that I cannot legally throw in the trash, bury in the ground, send to a landfill for disposal, [or legally handle with my bare hands], but which, they say, I can safely put in your mouth.... http://www.mgoldmandds.com/detox2.htm
Dr. Michael Ziff, a retired dentist who fought a four-year legal battle over mercury with the dental board in Florida, is now executive director of the Orlando-based International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology, a leading anti- mercury group with about 400 dentist members. The average American has seven mercury fillings, Ziff says. "It's kind of like holding seven leaking mercury thermometers in your mouth 365 days a year, 24 hours a day." Washington Post Where Does That Mercury Go? The public should be aware that the findings on dental amalgams cited in "Mercury in fillings do not seem to alter children's IQs" [Quick Study, April 25] contain data that obviously point out the danger of dental amalgams that was ignored, or not understood, by the authors. They present data showing that the urine levels of mercury in the amalgam-bearers at Year 2 was about 3.2 micrograms per liter vs. 1.3 for the composite-bearers. At Year 7 the levels were about 1.8 vs. 1.2, respectively, with the urine mercury levels dropping in the amalgam-bearers by 44 percent while no significant change occurred in the composite-bearers. The drop in urinary mercury excretion occurred in years 3 to 7 even though these children increased in the average number of amalgams and therefore the amount of exposure. How do you explain these results? The answer is retention of the mercury in the children's bodies as expected by the well-known toxic property of mercury, where it slowly impairs the body's physiological ability to excrete mercury and other heavy metals after extended exposure. It is this buildup that leads to later illnesses and represents why mercury-containing fillings should not be used. Boyd Haley
Through advertisements these two Frenchmen induced a large number of prosperous people to submit to their operations with this material and incensed many of the better dentists. This was the beginning of the amalgam wars, waged on at least two bases: first, the material was introduced by two Frenchmen who were little better than charlatans; second, the use of amalgam was opposed by some physicians as it was a source of mercury poisoning. .... Dr. Chapin A. Harris in his opening address to the first class of the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, founded in 1839 as the first dental college, said about amalgam that it is one of the most abomidable articles for filling teeth that could be employed. Many cases were reported of systemic effects and even death resulting from the presence of mercury in amalgam. Patients were sent to dentists by physicians with instructions to remove all amalgam fillings and the Onondaga Medical Society of New York adopted resolutions to the effect that amalgam produced depression, nervousness, indigestion, ptyalism, paralysis, and death.
http://www.talkinternational.com/TTCHPTR1.htm
http://www.talkinternational.com/TTCHPTR1.htm
http://www.garynull.com/Documents/Dental/Amalgam/Amalgam5.htm
http://www.garynull.com/Documents/Dental/Amalgam/Amalgam7.htm
http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=1429
Tuesday, May 2, 2006; Page HE02
Professor of Chemistry/Biochemistry
University of Kentucky
Lexington, Ky