One that you seem to have ...

One that you seem to have missed! One that kills oh so gently and slowly, stealing our old age and leaving us utterly incapacitated. One that even now is only grudgingly being recognised despite superb research by some of the finest brains that I know. That contaminant is aluminium.

I have a personal and tragic relationship with aluminium – it killed my wife 13years ago. Sixteen years after our municipal water supply in Camelford, Cornwall, UK was accidentally contaminated by up to 620mg/l of Al, at pH 3.5 (yes, that's precisely the case) she developed a sudden onset and rapidly fatal dementia, and died a year later. Her inquest and evidence on it made medical history - you can find the story on the Internet, if you have plenty of time to read the huge amount of stuff that deals with it – Google will show you the way!

But it doesn't normally take that much Al to bring on dementia in old age. Drinking water with only half the generally maximum permitted amount of Al in it – 0.1mg/l – doubles your risk of getting Alzheimer's (check out papers by Virginie Rondeau at al, Chris Exley, Don McClachlan, Lucija Tomljenovic and Chris Shaw, and many others) Don reckons that continually drinking this supposedly safe concentration for 20 years is enough to increase your risk by 250%. (Are you paying attention now?) The French have the lowest rate of dementia in Europe , and they don't drink tap water! Curious, that.

And another thing about Aluminium. It's used to make the raw water better, just as some lunatic nations allow their government to add fluoride to drinking water, in the unproven belief that it stops kids' teeth from rotting. Both these substances are used with the best of humanitarian intention.

So it's a bit of a shame, really, that when both are present in drinking water, and at the concentrations favored for our benefit, fluoride actually synergistically promotes the absorption of aluminium into our blood stream. That's right – fluoridating drinking water with perfectly permissible levels of residual aluminium, left over from the water treatment process, may be increasing our risk of developing dementia. (I'll not go into the complex relationships between Al, F and glyphosate here, it would only make you even more alarmed!)

So please do add aluminium to your list of priority action substances. It's not fashionable, it's not a political priority, yet dementia is indeed one of the biggest medical priorities that modern societies face (and ignore the weird and wonderful Zika fiasco – you'll be seeing some very interesting developments there very soon, and some very red faces too!)

There are alternatives to using Al in water treatment, such as ferrous sulphate, and no excuse whatever for making the situation worse by fluoridating water supplies. By all means get the other nasties out of drinking water – but for Heaven's sake don't make things even worse by adding proven neurotoxins to our most basic of consumer products. That way lies - almost literally – madness.

(Doug Cross, UK)