Bulletin #650

August 8, 2006

Dear Mayor Coccho,

Thank you for all your efforts to maintain fairness and balance in the discussions over water fluoridation in your community. Would you be kind enough to pass a copy of this letter to all members of the Corning City Council.

Dear City of Corning Councilors,

Regardless of whether you are for or against fluoridation, I urge you to stick to the plan as reported in the Star-Gazette on July 19, to invite Dr. Paul Connett, a leading opponent of fluoridation, to present his case to you in a workshop, before you vote on this matter.

Please be FAIR, and SEEN TO BE FAIR on this.

Please postpone any vote on this important issue until opponents have been given an EQUAL time to present their serious health concerns about this practice - concerns which have been thoroughly documented in a 3-year review by the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences. On March 22, this 12-membered panel called upon the US EPA to lower the safe drinking water standard from 4 ppm, and perform a new health risk assessment to determine a new standard. If normal regulatory procedures are followed, and political pressures do not interfere, and they use the information in the NRC report, we can anticipate a new MCLG (maximum contaminant level goal) which is lower than 1 ppm , which will end water fluoridation immediately.

Despite claims from the ADA and the CDC (long term zealous proponents of fluoridation) that this report had no relevance to fluoridation, three members of this NRC panel confirmed at a conference held on July 29,30 in Canton, NY, that both their exposure analysis (chapter 2) and the chapters on the brain, endocrine system, bone, and cancer were highly relevant to the exposures that some people receive in fluoridated communities.

To put this simply. 4 ppm (the level at which fluoride has to be removed as toxic contaminant) is already far too close for comfort to the 1 ppm added to water (as a beneficial additive) in fluoridation schemes. A lowered standard, even above 1 ppm, will remove any semblance of any margin of safety, when we consider the full range of sensitivities in a human population, and the fact that we cannot control how much water people drink and the fluoride they get from many other sources.

I hope you will also note that you are contemplating something which is not practiced in nearby Ithaca (home of world famous Cornell University), nor the state capital Albany, nor the vast majority of countries in the world, including nearly every country in Europe. Most industrialized countries have rejected this practice because a) there are too many unresolved health issues and b) they didn’t feel it right to impose this form of medicine on citizens who did not wish to receive it.

The claim that 1 ppm is very small is false. 1 ppm is nearly 200 times the level of fluoride found in mothers’ milk (0.006 ppm). This means a baby which is bottle fed will be getting nearly 200 tiems the level of fluoride nature intended at a time when its blood brain barrier is not fully developed.

The claim that we have nothing to worry about because 50 years of experience in the US has shown no health problems is highly deceptive because the US authorities have simply not conducted the most important and basic follow up studies on this. For example, even though millions of Americans are impacted by arthritis (one of the first symptoms of fluoride’s impact on the bones) and hypothyroidism (fluoride has been shown to lower thyroid function, especially for those with poor nutrition and are borderline iodine deficient) no US study has pursued a possible relationship with these “epidemics” and fluoride exposure.

Meanwhile, if one reviews the science of the matter, as opposed to anecdotal reports and unpublished pro-fluoridation government surveys, the benefits are very slight to non-existent and certainly not sufficient to justify the risks now thoroughly documented in the NRC review.

Corning has managed to avoid the bandwagon hype on this issue for over 50 years, and I hope you will keep it that way.

Finally, I hope it will give you pause for thought that you are being asked to do something to every man, woman and child in your community which an individual doctor cannot do to an individual patient - namely to force medication on them without their informed consent.

Sincerely,