The Death of Science |
Why is it that some doctors and dentists oppose fluoridation?
BFS suggested answer
Organisations representing the medical and dental professions in the UK including the British Dental Association, British Medical Association, and the Royal College of Physicians, and similar organisations worldwide, endorse the safety and efficacy of fluoridation. Those individuals who do not support fluoridation are out of step with the views of their professions as a whole. It would be unusual if 100% of any profession agreed on an issue.
BFS suggested answer refuted
Professionalism is about expert judgement, and judgements are apt to differ. On one subject, however, the medical and dental professions in this country have been unanimous for four decades: the benefits and safety of fluoridating drinking water supplies at one part per million.
Dr Peter Mansfield, 1997
Prior to my hearing this case, I gave the matter of fluoridation little if any thought but I received quite an education, and noted that the proponents of fluoridation do nothing more than try to impugn the objectivity of those who oppose fluoridation.
Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice J.P. Flaherty
Medicine – and that includes dentistry – is as much an art as a science: everything is not a clear-cut black or white; there are many grey areas. We are all one species; thus, for the most part whatever foods are good for one of us are good for all of us, and whatever diseases are harmful to one of us are harmful to all of us. However, we are all sufficiently individual that while some will suffer a disease during an epidemic, others will escape.
It is very unusual to find unanimity within the medical professions. Yet, for the most part, that is exactly what we appear to have had with fluoride for nearly half a century. It is particularly unusual in this case because, according to Dr Albert Schatz, ‘[M]any individuals with impeccable credentials in science, dentistry, and medicine have published incontrovertible evidence that fluoridation is harmful and does not reduce the incidence of dental caries.’1 There are literally tens of thousands of papers that have found that fluoride in all its forms is harmful. Not just harmful to us, but to other mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, plant life, even the very atmosphere we live in (fluorides have contributed to formation of the ozone hole). The real question, therefore, is not: Why is it that some doctors and dentists oppose fluoridation? but: Why do so many still support it?
It is true that in any organisation there will always be some who do not see eye-to-eye with their colleagues or agree with the stance of their professional organisation. That is not the case with fluoride. Speak out against fluoride, and you are not merely someone with a different opinion: you are immediately an outcast, shunned and reviled by your peers.
This was illustrated in a letter from Donald Kennedy, later to become commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Dr Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. Written to the Editorial Board, Consumer Reports, US Consumers Union, 4 March 1969, it read:
Many of the statements in the CR report on fluoridation are directly contradicted by readily available scientific research. Rather than weigh all new evidence as it appears, in a constant and critical reevaluation of the advisability of fluoridation, the promoting agencies – most notably the US public health service and the American Dental Association – have chosen to ignore any research that does not support their claims. On occasion they have suppressed information with negative implications for fluoridation; and many reputable, responsible scientists and physicians have been reluctant to voice any doubts they might have about the measure, because of the charges of quackery and worse that have been leveled at those who have objected to fluoridation in the past.
The statement, ‘fluorides in the amounts needed for decay prevention are unquestionably safe for people of all ages and for the chronically ill’, is sheer fabrication . . . The statement, (fluoride) ‘is toxic only in high concentrations that have no relevance to any conceivable use in a community’s water’, likewise shows a total disregard for readily available evidence. The amount of fluoride added to water averages one part per million (1 ppm), a concentration designed to provide each person with one milligram (1 mg) of fluoride per day – based on the shaky assumption that each person drinks a quart of water a day. The FDA has established 2 mg per day as the maximum safe dose; at levels of ingestion higher than that, there is a chance of cumulative harmful effects, after many years, at least in more sensitive individuals. Thus the daily dose of 1 mg doesn’t allow much room for safety . . . In addition, however, to this slim safety factor, it has been demonstrated that drinking water is not the only source of fluoride in our daily intake.
Blow the whistle – and be sacked
Scientists around the world were and are appalled at the notion of adding a known cumulative, protoplasmic poison to drinking water. Damage to humans, animals, plants and aquatic life is well documented in the literature even at levels less than the ‘optimal’ 1 part per million. Many scientists insist that fluoridation is scientifically, medically and ethically unsound. But those who voice such opinions are intimidated, denigrated and vilified by the fluoride promoters; they are refused publication in journals; and they are sacked from their jobs. Opposing fluoridation is a very dangerous thing to do.
A dentist defects
The late Dr John Colquhoun was chief dental officer of the Department of Health for Auckland, president of the New Zealand Fluoridation Society and a fervent supporter of fluoride and fluoridation. However, he discovered a number of worrying signs that led him to question the advisability of fluoridation. As a result of what he discovered, he came out against fluoridation. He explained his reasons in a public lecture given in Fife, Scotland, on 4 September 1996.2
In Auckland, Colquhoun had noticed a dramatic decline in decay rates that was not confined to the fluoridated areas. In both the fluoridated and unfluoridated parts of the city, the declines were similar. It was suggested to him that this was due to the use of fluoride toothpaste by children living in the unfluoridated part of the city. But he knew that in the unfluoridated part, very few children used fluoride toothpaste, most had not received fluoride applications to their teeth, and hardly any had been given fluoride tablets.
When he received the figures for Auckland, Colquhoun said: ‘To my horror, they showed that fewer fillings had been required in the unfluoridated part of Auckland than in the fluoridated part.’ So he asked for the national figures for tooth decay rates of all 5-year-olds in New Zealand, obtained from dental clinics throughout the country for the period 1930–90, together with data on water fluoridation and fluoride toothpaste use.
In Figure 1, you can see what Dr Colquhoun saw after he had analysed the figures: there had been a decline in decay rates over the whole period – beginning well before fluorides started to be used.
Source: Colquhoun J. Perspect Biol Med 1997; 41: 29–44.
Figure 1. Decay rates in 5-year-olds, flouridation and flouride toothpaste.
When Colquhoun received these figures, they came with a warning that they were not to be made public. Colquhoun realised why: ‘They showed that in most Health Districts the percentage of children who were free of tooth decay was greater in the unfluoridated parts of the district.’
It was a great and courageous step on Dr Colquhoun’s part when he came out against fluoridation. He was ‘retired’ from his post in 1990.
Dr William Marcus
Dr William Marcus, PhD, was senior science advisor and chief toxicologist at the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Drinking Water. In 1990, he was disturbed to find data from a study on rats by Battelle Northwest which showed an increased level of bone cancer and other kinds of cancer in the animals. In a radio interview with American journalist and broadcaster Gary Null, Dr Marcus said:3
When I got a hold of the contractor report and reviewed it very carefully . . . it was reporting cancers in the animals, osteosarcomas, which bothered me a lot because I’ve been trying to produce osteosarcomas in animals for almost twenty years and the only luck I ever had was with an experiment in dogs and monkeys, and the osteosarcomas took nearly the lifetime of the animals, and we were using radium which specifically produces that in bones, and here we have a compound commonly available (fluoride) that did it in rats in two years or less.
Secondarily, in that same study, there were cancers of the liver that are very rare according to the board-certified veterinary pathologist at the contractor, Battelle, and those really were very upsetting because they were hepatocholangiocarcinoma, a very, very rare liver cancer . . . then there were several other kinds of cancers found in the jaw and other places . . . It showed that the levels of the fluoride that caused the cancers in the animals were actually lower than those levels seen in people who are ingesting lower amounts but for longer periods of time and that was very, very worrisome. It meant that the general population could be exposed to fluoride known to cause cancer in animals and have levels near [those that caused] the cancer being produced in the bones.
In the USA, the law does not allow anything that has been shown to cause cancer in animals to be put in foods or drinks.
Dr Marcus went to the seminar at Research Triangle Park where representatives of the National Toxicology Program were presenting their review of the study. He attended with several colleagues, one of whom was a board-certified veterinary pathologist who had originally reported hepatocholangiocarcinoma as a separate entity in rats and mice. Marcus asked him if he would look at the slides to check that the diagnosis was correct. It was. But at the meeting, Dr Marcus found that every one of the cancers that was reported by the contractor had been downgraded by the NTP. He said:
Now I’ve been in the toxicology business looking at studies of this nature for nearly twenty-five years and I’ve never seen that, never ever seen where every single endpoint that was a cancer endpoint had been downgraded . . . I found that very suspicious . . . and found out that the scientists at the NTP down at Research Triangle Park had been coerced to change their findings.
Something was very wrong. Dr Marcus wrote a memo calling for a review of the cover-up of the National Toxicology Program study that shows fluoride is a ‘probable human carcinogen’. He was promptly fired from his job at the EPA.
Later, an investigation by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee corroborated his charges and produced evidence that government scientists had been pressured to portray fluoride more positively.
Dr Marcus endured a two-year lawsuit, which he won with punitive damages. He was then reinstated in his EPA job. Despite this, the classifications have never been reviewed.
Three days after she joyfully announced to the Forsyth Dental Institute that her neurotoxicity study (see Chapter 5) had been accepted for publication by the Journal of Neurotoxicology and Teratology, Dr Phyllis Mullenix was fired and all grants and funding for all her research projects stopped. The reason given by Forsyth for her dismissal was that her work was not ‘dentally related’! The institute’s director stated, according to Mullenix, that ‘they didn’t consider the safety or the toxicity of fluoride as being their kind of science’.4 In which case, why was Dr Mullenix assigned the study of fluoride toxicity in the first place?
Both Forsyth and the National Institutes of Health wanted to know in which journal her research was to be published, but she refused to disclose that information because she knew that they would attempt to stop its publication.
Soon after her dismissal, Dr Mullenix said, the Forsyth Institute received a quarter-million dollar grant from the Colgate toothpaste company. Coincidence or reward? Mullenix’s equipment and computers, designed specifically for the studies, were mysteriously damaged and destroyed by water leakage before she could remove them from Forsyth. Coincidence?
Dr Mullenix was then given an unfunded research position at Children’s Hospital in Boston, but with no equipment and no money. Mullenix said, ‘The people at Children’s Hospital, for heaven’s sake, came right out and said they were scared because they knew how important the fluoride issue was.’
Like Dr Marcus, Mullenix sued and won substantial punitive damages from her employers, but the career of this brilliant scientist was ruined because she found that fluoride was toxic.
Canadian dentist, Dr Allan S. Gray, found that the teeth of children in unfluoridated parts of British Columbia were in much better condition than those of children in the fluoridated areas.5 For publishing that research, the top public health dentist in British Columbia was demoted and sent to Ottawa, where he was put in a basement office and ordered never to speak to anybody about the matter again. If he did, he was told, he would lose his standing in the public health department of Canada and very likely all of his retirement benefits.
Conclusion
These are just four highly qualified and highly principled scientists who have had the courage to stand against the blinkered, uncaring might of the fluoride establishment. They are not alone, as more and more are changing sides.
The BFS talks glibly of individuals who are ‘out of step’ with their professions. But there are hundreds of dentists and scientists in other specialisations who have come out against fluoride. One has only to look at the qualifications of some of those who oppose fluoridation to see that they are not uninformed laymen or even rank-and-file members of their professions. Many are eminent and respected scientists with a wide range of health and environmental specialities. Appendix A provides a random selection of highly qualified men and women who are prominent in their fields and who have spoken out against fluoridation. The appendix includes leading dentists, scientists in other disciplines and sixteen Nobel Prize winners. Such a listing makes absurd the claims of fluoride promoters that there is ‘no scientific debate’ over fluoridation and that the only people who are concerned about it are ‘crackpots’.
1.Schatz A. Letter to Alderman Ray Jones, chairman, Operations and Environmental Committee, City of Calgary, 8 September 1997. http://www.cadvision.com/fluoride/calgaryl.htm.
2.Colquhoun J. Why I changed my mind about water fluoridation. Perspect Biol Med 1997; 41: 1–16.
3.Marcus W. Radio interview with Gary Null, Program #310. Broadcast 10 March 1995. Access at http://www.sonic.net/~kryptox/medicine/cancer/ifin19.txt.
4.The dark odyssey of Dr Phyllis Mullenix. World Internet News Distributary Source. http://thewinds.org/archive/medical/fluoride01-98.html. Accessed 15 September 2000.
5.Gray AS. Time for a new baseline. J Can Dent Assoc 1987; 53: 763–5.