Health Spectator

Sometimes we come across pieces in our files that never made it into “print” because they still had a few unfinished paragraphs or sentences, or maybe we just didn’t find time that week to do a final edit, after which it was forgotten. We think of them as orphans. This is one of those that we’ve come back to, finished and updated. We hope you find it useful, if much belated.

We saw it today on our own home page, right at the top of the list of the Reuters news feeds: Many Americans still do not get fluoridated water. The ensuing article quotes Dr. William Bailey of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Oral Health as bemoaning the tragedy that more Americans aren’t getting fluoridated water. Then, further down the list, we found a headline to an article on a related subject that set our hackles on end: US Mayors Agree to Phase Out Bottled Water.

Now don’t get us wrong: we’re no huge fan of bottled water. Yes, we understand that the plastic bottles are not only a huge waste-disposal problem, but generally unhealthy in their own right because of the plastic or its components leaching into the water. And so many of the commercial bottled waters are just bottled tap water sold by the likes of Coke and Pepsi anyway. (The worst of these are highly fluoridated as well.)

So we think of the American obsession with buying bottles of water as—well, misguided. It’s just one of the many things we’ve been brainwashed into doing by the corporate media. Watch enough television, and you’ll start buying bottled water too. And don’t get us started about the current practice of putting flavorings and sugar in the water and calling it a “sports drink.” (Yeah, right!)

However, one of the reasons we hate to say goodbye to bottled water is that it is the only way many Americans can get water that isn’t fluoridated, although the proposal to require fluoridation of bottled water has been put on the table.

So we couldn’t help but wax cynical when we read the following statement in the first-mentioned Reuters article about fluoridated water:

Asked if there is any responsible evidence showing negative health effects due to fluoridated water, Bailey said, “No, not at the levels that we use in community water systems.”

This statement is misleading and irresponsible. If you’re aiming for the minimum daily fluoride level at which the World Health Organization says you can expect to see a possible reduction in dental caries, then you have a very narrow range of water consumption at which to aim. Remember, municipalities have to bring their water to a certain agreed-upon concentration of fluoride (one milligram per liter is the accepted standard) a one-size-fits-all dosing proposition for an element that really has no place in the human diet.

The problem with this fixed dosage is that some people simply drink more water than others. In warmer climates, heat can be a major factor in determining the “healthy” concentration of fluoride—not that we’re pretending for a minute that there really is such a thing as a “healthy” dose of fluoride—please read our earlier post on fluoride if you disagree or don’t understand what we’re saying.

But aside from the fact that some individuals may drink more than a gallon of water a day, thereby increasing their water-borne fluoride consumption potentially into the danger zone, there is also the issue of cooking with the water and other ways that fluoride gets into our food, not to mention our tea.

Tea as a fluoride source

Tea, as it happens, absorbs fluoride from the environment more readily than any other edible plant. Suppose you come from one of those Southern families that drinks sweet iced tea all day. Not only are your teeth likely to rot (despite the fluoride) because of all the sugar in the tea, but your fluoride levels are quite liable to become dangerous because tea, of all foods, absorbs fluoride from the environment at a phenomenal rate. What’s more, the areas where tea is grown—primarily India and China—are known for having problems with fluoridation.

Of course, their problems occur not because their governments are foolish enough to mandate adding fluoride to their water supplies, but because they are unfortunate enough to have abundant natural supplies of mineral fluoride polluting their water supplies. One look at what this does to cattle, and you will be convinced that fluoride does not belong in your drinking water. Trust me on this.

In fact, in March 2006, the National Academy of Sciences released a report urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to lower the permissible levels of fluoride in water and expressing concern not only about fluoride’s mutagenicity and probable carcinogenity, but about its potential to lower IQs as well. That report, paid for by the CDC, also cited the CDC’s own data on dental fluorosis, the mottling of teeth seen in many children raised on fluoridated water and known to be concommitant with reduced IQs.

Fluorosis on the rise

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) survey conducted from 1999 to 2002 found an overall dental fluorosis rate of 32 percent among U.S. school children aged 6 to 19 years old, an increase of nine percent over a similar survey conducted about 20 years earlier¹. During approximately the same period, the fluoridation of U.S. water supplies increased from 62% in 1992 to 67% in 2000, then to 69% in 2006—also coincidentally a nine percent difference in total.

The irony is that this is data produced by the CDC, the agency that employs Dr. William Bailey. You’d think he’d know about the dental fluorosis figures at least, wouldn’t you? Yet he still thinks that fluoride does no harm at levels applied to our drinking water?

And while we didn’t go into it in our more comprehensive article on the subject, there really is no convincing, reliable evidence that fluoride is good for the teeth in any concentration. (Certainly removing sugar from the diet will do more to benefit a person’s teeth.)

Benefits of fluoride: urban myth

The particular urban myth that fluoride is beneficial can be traced to the Manhattan Project, believe it or not, and was the brainchild of Harold Carpenter Hodge, a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project for the military.² The notion that fluoride was beneficial was a fiction manufactured by the Manhattan Project in general and by Hodge in particular to circumvent the government’s early problems with lawsuits resulting from fluoride-induced environmental damage and its general PR problem surrounding injuries caused by atomic bomb manufacture.

Amazingly, at the same time that he was head of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology, Hodge also headed the International Association for Dental Research (IADR).³ This frightful juxtaposition of roles put him in an ideal spot for successful propaganda, particularly since his government role with the AEC was a secret.

But the story gets more curious still. A Harvard professor was recently investigated for falsifying research results in favor of water fluoridation. What moves people to do such things, we don’t know. Perhaps they believe in their heart of hearts that they are right and the evidence is wrong.

For those of you who think this is all just crank stuff, think again. A 2005 Wall Street Journal article by Sharon Begley⁴ refers to the suppression of evidence that finally came to the attention of National Research Council (NRC) members in 2005 and involved a Harvard professor who signed off on a PhD thesis but then suppressed the results of that thesis when reporting on the dangers of fluoridation to the NRC.

We’re not making this up, folks! Here is text from a June 27, 2005 letter written by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) to Ms. Janice Strother, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Ethics Coordinator:

During the past week we have had several conversations with NIEHS ethics staff about potential serious misrepresentations of research results contained in a final report to NIEHS submitted by Dr. Chester Douglass, chairman of the Harvard University School of Dental Medicine’s Department of Oral Health Policy and Epidemiology for grant number 5 R01 ES06000.

We are writing to request a formal investigation into this issue, based on the discrepancies described below. The principle issue of concern is the serious contradiction between the conclusion in the grant report, where Dr. Douglass reports no evidence of a link between fluoride and osteosarcoma, and the findings of the grant-supported publications listed in support of this position that conclude exactly the opposite.

By reporting the results of grant-supported publications in this way, it appears that Dr. Douglass may have violated Sec. 93.103 (b) of federal research rules concerning falsification of data and the reporting of research results.

Specifically, in the grant report, Dr. Douglass concludes that there is no evidence of a link between fluoride and osteosarcoma, and references work by Dr. Elise Bassin as one of only two publications supported by the grant that support this finding.

The issue is that Dr. Bassin’s findings, contained in her doctoral thesis at Harvard, do not support the finding that Douglass reported to NIEHS–but instead resoundingly contradict it. What makes this inconsistency more curious is that Douglass was the lead advisor on the Bassin doctoral thesis. Dr. Douglass personally signed off on Dr. Bassin’s research.

In Douglass’s grant report to NIEHS he presents only the following conclusions fluoride and bone cancer: “The analysis carried out for the Orthopedic Surgery I Research meeting reported an Odds Ratio of 1.2 t o 1.4 between fluoride and Osteosarcoma that was not significantly different from 1.”

The Bassin doctoral thesis was one of two grant-supported publications cited in support of this conclusion. However, the Bassin work does not support this finding. In contrast, the Bassin doctoral thesis found a strong, statistically significant association between fluoride levels in tap water during the mid-childhood growth spurt and osteosarcoma in adolescent boys. This is even more noteworthy because the Bassin work is the most rigorous study of the link between bone cancer and fluoride in tap water ever conducted in the United States.

In a 2005 report submitted to the NRC review panel on the Toxicology of Fluoride in Water, Dr. Paul Connett, Chris Neurath and Michael Connett wrote as follows:

In April of 2001, a critically important addition to the scientific literature on fluoride and osteosarcoma was produced, in the form of a PhD dissertation, at Harvard University (Bassin, 2001). Due to difficulties in obtaining access to this work, we have only recently been able to assess its importance. The thesis, authored by Dr. Elise Bassin, found a strong statistically significant relationship between fluoride exposure during the 6th to 8th years of life (the “mid-childhood growth spurt”) and the later development of osteosarcoma among young males.

Her study utilized two important improvements in methodology over all previous studies.

First, she looked at age-specific exposure instead of cumulative lifetime exposure or “snapshot” time-of-diagnosis exposure. While previous papers have pointed to the biological plausibility of fluoride inducing osteosarcoma during a narrow “window of vulnerability”, Bassin is the first author to analyze her data in a manner capable of detecting the “window.”

Second, Bassin improved the accuracy of fluoride exposure assessment for her subjects by using more detailed methods of ascertaining the actual fluoride content of drinking water for individual subjects (Bassin 2004).

If Bassin’s methods and findings are applied to the interpretation of earlier studies, we believe they may explain why several researchers were not able to detect an association between fluoride and osteosarcoma. Bassin’s work effectively reopens the entire question of fluoride’s carcinogenicity and gives strong new evidence that it is in fact a carcinogen.

Indeed, Dr. Bassin’s work was precisely the sort of scientific evidence opponents of water fluoridation had been seeking. In the absence of any real scientific studies surrounding fluoride—the government agencies merely recited their philippic that the safety and benefits of fluoride were well proven and refused to do any further research—they could only point to the declassified writings of the Atomic Energy Commission as proof of the deviousness behind the whole charade about fluoride benefits. And those stories harried even those who knew their liturgy by heart with nighmarish disbelief.

How could a skeptical public be expected to buy what appeared on the surface to be yet another left-wing conspiracy theory? And how were they to convince the scientific committees without adequate hard scientific proof? The ghost of Harold Hodge leered at them from the shadows.

I am reminded of my astonishment in coming across the following passage in the journal Toxicological Sciences, where the exploits of Harold Hodge as the first president and co-founder of the Society of Toxicology were duly recorded:

Appointed initially in biochemistry, Hodge pursued dental research including the toxicity of fluoride, as there was a huge stigma against using fluoride for the public health. (It was, after all, a rat poison.) Today, of course, we fully recognize the benefits of adding fluoride to drinking water.⁵

That a toxicologist could—in the same paragraph—note that fluoride was used as a rat poison and that it was “beneficial” to the public health astounded me. At any rate, according to his Toxicological Sciences eulogy, Hodge was ever the perfect gentleman. An inspiration to his students and colleagues alike, his life was one of grand gestures and great works.

One has to understand, I think, that convincing the public of the benefits of fluoride in drinking water must have become for Hodge a cause célèbre, one of those duties performed for God and country. The demands of National Security during World War II must have applied an unrelenting pressure on him to bury the secret of fluoride toxicity deeper and deeper.

Were his good works driven all the more by an underlying sense of guilt at the lie he was perpetrating about a poison that every day harmed more innocent children? Or was his right hand totally unaware of his left hand’s activities? One cannot help but wonder.

The whole story of the quest for truth in the toxicological effects of fluorine in the human body is precisely that sort of tortuous, tortured enigma.

Fluoride MCLG should be zero

In a written critique of the aforementioned report from the NRC regarding fluoride levels in water, Dr. Robert Carton, a former risk assessment scientist at the EPA, wrote that “the recommended Maximum Contaminant Level Goal (MCLG) for fluoride in drinking water should be zero.”

Europeans don’t have to worry about water fluoridation. Fluoridation in Europe is banned completely. because fluoridation is medication without consent, which is not allowed under European law. Fluoride is often added to drinking water in the form of fluorosilic acid, which is obtained as a by-product of the phosphate mining industry and is generally contaminated with trace amounts of arsenic, lead, mercury and other contaminants.

Fluorosilic acid is a highly corrosive and dangerous fuming acid, which cannot be disposed of in landfills or at sea. However, it can be transported on our roads and rail network, and put into our water supply.

And you thought your government was looking out for you.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 25th, 2009 at 4:59 pm and is filed under CDC, fluoride. You can follow any comments for this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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