FAN Bulletin #552

April 5, 2000

“We are also finding some positive associations between fluoride and osteosarcoma in the overall (not age specific) analysis of the first set of cases.”

“Douglass had nothing but praise for the work. ‘She did a good job. She had a good group of people advising her. And it’s a nice - it’s a nice analysis. There’s nothing wrong with that analysis,’ he said.”

The study or studies which Douglass discusses were originally planned to last for 4 years beginning in 1992. They were in direct response to the NTP rat studies, the Hoover 1991 and Cohn 1992 studies, all of which found an association between fluoride for males, especially young male humans. The funding grants have been extended and renewed until the present date, a length of 15 years, or 10 years beyond the initial planned conclusion date. Douglass has been Principle Investigator for most of that time. To date, he has only published the short 1995 abstract http://www.fluoridealert.org/images/douglass-1995.gif with it’s flawed analysis methods (an analysis which focused only on the average F level of all cases versus controls negates the entire point of conducting a case-control study).

No one else associated with this 15 year project has ever published anything until today with Bassin in this issue of Cancer Causes and Control.

FAN had to resort to a Freedom of Information Request to try to obtain any interim reports of other progress updates for this 15 year project. Even after almost a year, no reports from this project have been forthcoming under our FOIA request. In fact, FAN would not have known of the existence of Bassin’s work except that Douglass submitted a “Final Report” to the NRC committee reviewing the toxicology of fluoride in late 2004. In that report, Douglass listed Bassin’s thesis as a reference, but in the text of the report claimed that the study had found no evidence of an association between fluoride and osteosarcoma.

This misleading information about his government funded study was the basis for a charge of scientific fraud by EWG which is still being investigated by Harvard University. The investigation has gone on for almost 9 months and EWG has not once been contacted by Harvard either to provide any evidence or to update them on the progress of the investigation. Over a month ago a local investigative journalist in Boston interviewed Dr. Douglass and Douglass said he had just come from a meeting with Harvard lawyers where it had been decided to “give them all the reports from the FOIA request”. As FAN was the first party to even learn of the existence of Bassin’s thesis and discover Douglass’s misleading “Final Report” and we submitted our FOIA request soon after that, we must assume he was referring to our FOIA request. His interview was conducted more than a month ago and we have yet to see a single document from Douglass or from his 15 year study, other than a few we received from the very early years.

Douglass selectively cites Bassin’s present paper to give the misleading impression that Bassin herself concurs that his second set of data suggest no association between fluoride and osteosarcoma. In fact, Bassin specifically warns that reliance on either bone fluoride or lifetime cumulative exposures is likely to miss finding a risk that exists only in a limited time span. Bone fluoride reflects total lifetime accumulation of fluoride and can not be used to determine exposure rates for specific periods of life such as ages 6-8. The same goes without saying for lifetime cumulative exposure. Douglass says both of these approaches seem to be showing no effect in his 2nd set of data. Bassin warns that this is likely. For Douglass to imply Bassin’s endorsement of his methods distorts her paper.

Douglass claims he will also analyze the second set of data using an age-specific analyses, just as Bassin recommends. As almost an afterthought in the final paragraph he says:

“A parallel analysis of age-specific exposure to fluoride, especially during growth periods, is also being pursued by our study team in the second set of cases of our study.”

This analysis is not dependent on the bone fluoride levels. Douglass states that the second set of data was complete in 2003. It is now 3 years since he had the data that could have been analyzed with an age-specific exposure method, as Bassin recommended in 2001. Douglass has no explanations for this delay in what must be considered a study of serious public health consequence.

Osteosarcoma strikes several hundred teenage boys a year, and if Bassin’s findings are borne out, a large portion of those may have been the result of fluoride exposure through fluoridated water. Over 60% of Americans drink water to which fluoride has been added so that it exceeds the level at which Bassin found this strong effect.