Jan 25, 2007

Dear All,

I have never hidden my disgust about the activities of the Oral Health Division of the CDC (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia) with respect to their fervent and unscientific promotion of water fluoridation. If we were dealing with a non governmental organization, which was set up to promote a particular program or point of view, their behavior might be tolerable, in fact democracy thrives on the exchanges between such groups.  However, with these organizations, the public becomes accustomed to the need to sort out the “facts” from the “hype”. However, with the CDC we are not dealing with a non governmental organization. Here we are dealing with an important arm of the US Public Health Services which at taxpayers’ expense is set up to protect our health. In this case, the public should not have to work its way through a maze of public relations spin – let alone outright falsehoods - to get to the truth.

As citizens and taxpayers we have the right to expect nothing less than the most stringent application of science in the important endeavor to protect our health and particularly the health of our children. We should not find ourselves fending off the machinations of an agency which is hell bent on promoting a practice, however well-intentioned some who have promoted it in the past, might have been.  Especially a practice which has been rejected by the vast majority of countries in the world (less than 10 countries worldwide have more than 50% of their population drinking fluoridate water). We should not expect, for example, with the current state of the scientific literature on the matter of fluoride’s toxicity, that top officials from the Oral Health Division of this agency, would go out and publicly support statewide mandatory fluoridation, which they have done within the last three years in Arkansas, New Jersey and Oregon.

In short, we should not find ourselves confronting an agency using our tax dollars to mobilize public relations to protect this practice, regardless of scientific findings. We should not be dealing with an agency which spins the science and massages the truth. They are there – or should be – to mobilize the best scientific judgment to protect our health. They are not doing this.

If we are to prevail against the unethical, ineffective and risky business of water fluoridation, a key step must be to get the “scientists” engaged in promoting this practice at the Oral Health Division of the CDC, testifying – and cross-examined - under oath. Ideally, this should take place in the US Congress, but if our legislators let us down on this, other avenues must be found to get their testimony under oath. This is not going to be easy. We are up against the huge power of government and millions of dollars in lobbying power from the ADA. But we have something that they don’t have: we have integrity, and the truth is on our side. These are two of the most powerful weapons in a democracy. A third is the willingness of the media to dig deep into an issue and – uninfluenced by its advertisers - find out which side is telling the truth.

In the next three parts in this series, we will examine (re-examine) three places where the CDC’s actions on defending this practice are demonstrably unscientific, and unless we are willing to grant them an extraordinary level of incompetence, dishonest: