As a San Diego Holistic Dentist, I am pleased to report that Californians for Green Dentistry launched an initiative to ban dental mercury on July 29, 2010, The pilot project, to create mercury-free dental zones in California. was begun in the city of Costa Mesa, in Orange County.

On October 19th, 2010 Costa Mesa City Council passed the Monahan Resolution, named for Councilman Gary Monahan, the first of it’s kind in the US. Monahan, who has an autistic son, has championed the Resolution to improve environmental health. Hopefully we can look forward to similar enlightened poltical action here in our own community.

See the video below:

Here is the next part of the EMF series looking into cell phone use and environmental health. Cell phones were characterized on the show by Dr. Sanjay Gupta as a “non-ionizing, microwave-producing device”. One viewer commented that cell phones may be the cigarettes of the 21st century:

According to Dr. Masur, who lectured yesterday at the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, there were 4.6 billion cell phone users worldwide as of 2009. Some of them may be wondering about the effects of EMF’s. Based on Dr. Masur’s line of thinking, if there are dental amalgams (silver fillings) present and frequent cell phone use, there will be a synergistic effect between the mercury in the filling/s and radiation from the phone that will promote free radical damage.

The following video of a Larry King show on the topic of cell phones was aired in May of 2008.

Earlier today Dr. Charles Masur MD spoke at the annual conference of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine in La Jolla on the synergistic effects of electromagnetic fields and heavy metals on the body’s inability to prevent free radical damage. Dr. Masur outlined seven of the 275 hazardous materials monitored by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a division of the CDC. Mercury from fish and dental amalgams was third on the list.

He also discused electromagnetic hypersensitivity, a syndrome that the World Health Organization (WHO) has characterized as “a variety of non-specific symptoms…. The symptoms most commonly experienced include dermatological symptoms (redness, tingling, and burning sensations) as well as …(fatigue, tiredness, concentration difficulties, dizziness, nausea, heart palpitation, and digestive disturbances).” More information is available at the WHO web page: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs296/en/index.html

One of Dr. Masur’s main concerns was amount of exposure from “dirty electricity”. There is a resonance between high frequency radio waves from sources like power lines and the fields generated by common household appliances and electonic devices when residential currents have not been properly grounded with copper. Even when there is proper grounding, there is still electromagnetic “smog” created by the home’s electical grid. This type of pollution was also discussed in Dr. Robert Becker’s book Cross Currents.