http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/GE1309/S00146/the-fluoridation-experiment-should-cease.htm
THE FLUORIDATION EXPERIMENT
SHOULD
CEASE
Robert
Mann Sep
2013
I
made a paid hobby, in my academic career, of publicising several health
hazards. The first, in 1971 – aerial spraying of 2,4,5-T –
provoked anti-fluoridation ppactivists to accost me for help. I wouldn't have anything to do with
them; Prof Edson (Otago) had
looked into fluoridation and concluded it caused no harm and some benefit.
Ensuing campaigns
against nuclear weapons, nuclear power stations, lead additives in petrol,
genetic 'engineering' etc. forced me to realise that governments pcan quite
often be misled by misrepresentations of science. I therefore later looked into fluoridation for myself. The evidence failed to show detectable
good. That fact alone should rule
out any such mass medication.
Worse, several types of harm to health are strongly suggested by
evidence which, in circumstances of uncontrolled pvariables, cannot be
scientifically conclusive but is more than worrying enough to rule out
fluoridation.
Contrast
the proven mass medication of iodised salt, which does prevent goitre pand is
not suspected of harm. Another
example is folate supplement in bread flour, which prevents a worthwhile
proportion of birth defects such as spina bifida.
As the facts stand
today, there is good evidence that fluoride can inhibit tooth decay
(caries) – if applied directly to the teeth ( in
fluoridated toothpaste); but fluoride in drinking water, a thousand times less
concentrated, is not proven to confer any benefit.
Tooth
decay turns out to have declined by about two-thirds since the 1950s in the
wealthy countries that gather dental statistics. This welcome trend is not understood; possible causes
include improved diet, better brushing, widespread antibiotics secreted in
saliva, and, more recently, fluoride in toothpaste, a concentrated direct
application that does work. Much
of the decrease in NZ preceded, and therefore cannot have been caused by,
fluoridation.
In
some still-controversial studies, fluoridation has been rather closely
correlated with cancer. Various
other types of harm have been reasonably suspected; the one established beyond
dispute is dental fluorosis - bilaterally symmetrical diffuse white
mottling of the teeth, a form of damage commonly observed among children
drinking water fluoridated to 1 ppm (i.e 1 mg/litre). The margin, if any, is uncomfortably
slim between 1 ppm and levels known to cause serious damage to bones (skeletal
fluorosis).
Also, there are
many possibilities for adverse synergistic reactions between the fluoride added
to water and the thousands of other chemicals to which modern industrial
systems expose us. Little research
is done to look for such synergisms.
Lack of evidence does not equal proof of safety!
The
oft-mentioned Hastings fluoridation experiment begun in 1952 is widely believed
to have proven that fluoride added to the public water supply decreases tooth
decay; but detailed review has revealed it was rigged. The experiment was
initially planned with a 'control' city, Napier, drawing from the same aquifer,
not fluoridated (natural concentration 0.015 ppm fluoride). Surviving records suggest the decay
rate was declining if anything faster in Napier than in Hastings. That was presumably the reason why the
comparison was quietly abandoned.
A
key intervention, also not publicised, was the order to refrain from filling
tiny defects in enamel. This was
doubtless a logical improvement in dentistry; but it had the effect of
decreasing the filling rate, which is, in such thorough systems of dental
services, very close to the decay rate.
The claimed success was, in this way, rigged.
A
yet less widely known fact I pointed out in 1986: within the design of the
Hastings/Napier experiment, the dental nurses ceased their routine application
of concentrated fluoride directly onto teeth. This change makes all the more difficult any inferences of
effects during the study.
Later
trials claimed to demonstrate benefit from fluoridation have been severely
criticized for lack of controls, and other major defects. Thorough surveys (including in NZ) have
refuted early claims that natural fluoride in water is correlated with relative
freedom from tooth decay.
Fluoridation
reclassifies toxic waste liabilities of aluminium smelters (sodium fluoride)
and superphosphate factories (fluosilic acid & many other names) into
commercial products disbursed as 'mass medication'.
The
majority of dentists, who continue to advocate fluoridation as taught in their
BDS lectures, stand to lose financially from fluoridation if it does decrease
caries. They are behaving
altruistically, not selfishly.
They deserve credit for good intentions. But the facts refute their misinformed belief.
Dr Mann was Senior Lecturer in
Biochemistry & in Environmental Studies, University of Auckland; he
published the main facts on the 'Hastings' experiment, with his then doctoral
student the dentist John Colquhoun, in The Ecologist
<http://exacteditions.theecologist.org/read/resurgence/vol-16-no-6-1986-5395/18/3/>
