A message from FAN director Paul Connett:
Heading for the Showdown
Over
the last 18 years the Fluoride Action Network has been doing everything
it possibly can to educate the public, the media, decision-makers,
professional bodies and government agencies on the dangers of fluoride
and the foolishness of the water fluoridation program.Starting with our Fifth Citizens Conference on Fluoride we are heading for a showdown. A showdown between parents, professionals, and decision-makers who have exercised due diligence on this issue and the health agencies and regulatory bodies who have refused to exercise theirs.
Instead
of due diligence and honest attention to the science on this issue,
these bureaucratic entities in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand,
the UK and the US, continue to put more political effort and taxpayers’
money into protecting this outdated and reckless practice than
protecting the health of their citizens. Even as I write, the Australian
government agency (the National Health and Medical Research Council,
NHMRC) is preparing another whitewash of the science
on fluoridation’s safety and effectiveness, using specially selected
largely pro-fluoridation “experts.” Citizens in Australia have done
everything they could to get a balanced panel but have been thwarted.
Last
time round (in 2007) the NHMRC dished up an extraordinary piece of work
just in time to support the new premier of Queensland’s effort to bring
in mandatory fluoridation to that state. The NHMRC panel was
specifically asked by citizens to include the landmark 500-page review
by the US National Review (NRC, 2006). But instead of doing so the NHMRC
panel nonchalantly dismissed this report in two sentences claiming that
the concentrations in the studies reviewed were much higher than the
levels used in fluoridation in Australia. It is hard to believe that the
“experts” who wrote this were so ignorant of toxicological principles
that they didn’t know the difference between concentration and dose and
that they didn’t know there is need for a margin of safety analysis when
studies have found harm at doses uncomfortably close to the levels
experience in fluoridated communities.
Such
a self-serving and sweeping dismissal of the NRC review ignored among
other things the panel’s conclusion (chapter 2) that some subsets of the
US population (including bottle-fed infants) were exceeding the EPA’s
safe reference dose of 0.06 mg per kg bodyweight per day consuming water
fluoridated at 1 ppm.
Australia is not alone in producing these self-serving government-sponsored reviews, see chapter 24 in The Case Against Fluoride by
Connett, Beck and Micklem for a description of similar biased reviews
from Ireland and Canada and we can expect more as this practice comes
under more attack in more and more communities.
Meanwhile,
a slow-speed atrocity grinds on in Washington, DC, where the US
Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Water is trying to find a
way to come up with a new safe drinking water standard goal (MCLG –
maximum contaminant level goal) for fluoride without undermining the
Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) water fluoridation
program. In other words they are struggling to find a way of coming up
with an MCLG greater than 1 ppm. In January 2011 the EPA indicated that
the way they were going to do this was to choose severe dental fluorosis
as the most sensitive end point for fluoride’s toxicity, and apply an
uncertainty factor of 1 to data collected over 60 years ago! However, to
get away with this travesty of science the EPA would have to show that
all the children who had their IQ lowered in 37 published studies,
including the 27 reviewed by the Harvard University team (Choi et al.,
2012) had severe dental fluorosis. If they can’t do that then lowered IQ must be considered a more sensitive end point than severe dental fluorosis.
So this is where the final showdown between parents and our health agencies should begin.
At the FAN conference Dr. Bill Hirzy a former risk assessment
specialist at the EPA, will show that if a standard risk assessment
procedure is applied to several of the IQ studies reviewed by the
Harvard University, then the only defendable MCLG is ZERO. Under the
Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA has to set an MCLG at a level, which “protects the whole population - including the most vulnerable - from known and reasonably anticipated harm.”
An MCLG of zero would end fluoridation immediately.
On
Saturday all attendees of the FAN conference (which we hope will
include members of the media and government officials) will hear the
details of Hirzy’s calculations which lead to an MCLG of zero. On Sunday
we will brainstorm on how Parents Against Fluoridation
can take this message to every community in the fluoridated world. On
Monday the message will be taken to Congress. Our message to them: learn
what we have found out, force the EPA to do its job honestly and the
foolish practice of fluoridation can be ended before another child is
harmed.
Paul Connett, PhD
Co-author of The Case Against Fluoride (Chelsea Green, 2010).
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