FAN Bulletin 894

December 8, 2007

Dear All,

Please note the number for this bulletin. I have numbered the specials I sent out on the road (the “Connett-Lennon debates” on the Isle of Man) as #892 and #893. More to come on these debates later.

I’m back from Europe. A lot has been happening on the fluoridation front, especially in Australia. See the details in “the latest news” section on our home page – http://www.FluorideAction.net  - third button down on left hand column under our logo.

The most sickening news is that the Queensland government has decided to force fluoridation on the whole state. I find this personally very distressing. As readers know I was in Australia in October and Jean Ryan organized a superb environmental health conference at the Queen Elizabeth hospital. I gave two presentations, one on the biochemistry of fluoride and the other on the arguments against fluoridation. To the best of my knowledge not one of the people now loudly promoting this policy attended either of these lectures. This is in keeping with Australia’s national fluoridation policy of “if you don’t look, you don’t find.” In over 40 years of fluoridation in Australia not one state health agency or the federal health agency has ever conducted, or supported, a study on any tissue other than the teeth. The arrogance of those who promote this outdated practice is breathtaking. Not to mention their dishonesty.

Here is an excerpt from an email from someone who had a “conversation” with NSW’s number one promoter of fluoridation, Mr. John Irving, who describes himself as  a “public health information officer” for a regional health department.

“Of particular interest to you will be an encounter I had with John Irving when I asked him, after the meeting, if he would be prepared to debate someone in a public forum who was equally qualified on the subject. He asked who I had in mind and I asked him if he had heard of Dr Connett, to which he replied ‘oh. yes I know him, he calls me a bully’. I said then how would you feel about a public debate with him? Irving then became quite agitated and said he didn’t like public debates because the attendance was always stacked with anti fluoridationists. I replied that the attendees were not the issue, a debate was in which facts and myths could be debated in public. He grew even more agitated then and said Connett’s research is baseless and I replied that probably depends where your coming from but it’s not the issue, it’s up to the public to judge, and he became quite accusing [bullying??] and at this stage was right in my face poking his finger saying ‘have you read his research? well come on answer me, have you?’ This banter went on for a few minutes with me saying my reading PC’s research is irrelevant to a debate question and with him getting louder and louder and by now poking me in the chest loudly demanding me to answer his question. He then walked away a few steps to pack up his things and I approached him again asking him for an answer to the question of a public debate, when he abruptly turned to me and said, ‘will you piss off and stop badgering me’.”

Also sickening is the the text of the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) review of fluoridation now that it has been made available on the web.

In bulletin #891 (Smoking gun from Australia) I printed a letter from from the director of the Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) to Professor Warwick Anderson, Chief Executive Officer of the NHMRC, telling him in no uncertain terms that he expects the NHMRC to issue a statement of support for fluoridation. The NHMRC duly did so in a press statement in November (see FAN bulletin #890) with a promised report to follow. In their statement they re-iterated the mantra that fluoridation was “safe and effective”. I have printed the full newsletter below for the benefit of new subscribers.

In bulletin #891 I raised this question:

“How was the NHMRC able to satisfy these pressures and also deal with the damning evidence presented in the NRC (2006) review?”

Now remember the National Research Council review published on March 22, 2006 was conducted by the first truly balanced panel in the  60-year history of this practice. It took the 12-membered team three and half years to complete and the final product was 507 pages long and had over 1000 references to the scientific literature. Unlike the York Review (McDonagh et al., 2000) they looked at ALL the evidence – not just epidemiological studies. They looked at clinical trials, animal studies, biochemical studies and even theoretical models. It was a massive piece of work and must now be considered THE textbook on fluoride’s toxicology. It should also be considered the starting point for any body claiming to examine the safety of water fluoridation.

This was the NHMRC (2007) treatment of the NRC (2006) review. On page 19 the authors write:

“The reader is also referred to recent comprehensive reports regarding water fluoridation published by the World Health Organization (WHO, 2006) and the National Research Council of the National Academies (NAS, 2006). The NAS report refers to the health effects from fluoride at 2-4 mg/L. The reader is alerted to the fact that fluoridation of Australia’s drinking water occurs in the range of 0.6 - 1.1 mg/L.”

That’s it – they make no further reference or use of the evidence contained in this massive report. End of story!

If those who wrote this report are honest scientists – which I doubt – this statement certainly demonstrates an incredible lack of knowledge on toxicology and the way it is applied by regulatory agencies worldwide. Let me explain.

1) They are confusing concentration with dose. Concentration is measured in mg/liter. Dose is measured in mg/day. The dose thus clearly depends on a) how much water you drink (mg/Liter x liters drunk per day) and b) how much fluoride you get from other sources.

2) High water consumers at 1 ppm will get more fluoride than low water consumers at  2 ppm or 4 ppm.

3) Normally when assessing the potential dangers of a toxic substance when exposing a whole population one applies a margin of safety factor to the no observable adverse health effect (NOAEL) (and a more stringent margin of safety factor if one only has a  lowest observable adverse health effect (LOAEL)) to determine a dose which is protective of ALL members of society. This includes the very young (and even the fetus if you are dealing with an endocrine disruptor), the very old, the very sick, people with poor kidney function, and those with poor diet.

4) Thus if health effects are observed at 2-4 ppm, even a moderate safety factor would make it unacceptable to expose the whole population to 1 ppm in their drinking water.

5) In my view Nature has provided us with what can be considered a safe level for babies – the level of fluoride in mothers milk - which is 0.004 ppm, i.e. 250 times LESS than the 1 ppm used in water fluoridation.

6) More often than not when assessing the dangers of a toxic substance regulators are forced to rely on animal studies. Then they have the tricky problem of extrapolating from high dose animal experiments to low dose human exposures. In the case of fluoride, even though we have a wealth of data of fluoride’s dangers from animals studies, including one remarkable study in which rats drinking water at 1 ppm for one year, developed kidney damage, brain damage, a greater uptake of aluminium into the brain and the formation of beta-amyloid deposits which are characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease (Varner et al., 1998), we have a vast amount of human data, largely from India and China, and at doses at, or very close to, the levels which humans are exposed to in fluoridated communities.

7) Using the standard methods applied by agencies such as the US EPA no one can deny that the level at which harm occurs in humans in many tissues (the teeth, the bone, the brain and the endocrine system), as comprehensively referenced by the NRC (2006), indicates that there is no adequate margin of safety to protect the whole population when drinking uncontrolled quantities of fluoridated water. If any one has any doubts about this please read Dr. Robert Carton’s important article published in Fluoride http://www.fluoridealert.org/health/epa/nrc/carton-2006.pdf. Dr. Carton was a former risk assessment expert at the US EPA.

The NHMRC examines no animal studies, no biochemical studies, no clinical trials and no theoretical models. Instead, like the York Review, they use the straight-jacket of human epidemiological studies. This may serve the academic interests of those who like to apply meta-analysis to such studies but is not a scientific way of protecting the public from harm. Especially when one remembers that few of the countries which practice fluoridation (including Australia) have conducted any health studies on any tissue other than the teeth. Garbage in, garbage out. Fluoridating countries have even failed to do the most basic and the most obvious studies, like using the severity of dental fluorosis as a biomarker to check suspected impacts of fluoride on children’s development: eg. Bone fractures, onset of puberty, behavioral problems, altered thyroid function and lowered IQ.

The Australian failure to consider impacts of fluoride on thyroid function is particularly egregious in my view since Australia has a huge problem with iodine deficiency, and fluoride can exacerbate the impacts of low iodine on the thyroid.

Nor does the NHMRC remind us that in 1991 they recommended to the Australian health authorities that they examine scientifically the anecdotal reports of some individual’s being particularly sensitive to fluoride. The authorities never did so, thus the NHMRC has no such studies to review in 2007!

Nor does the NHMRC remind us that the 1991 panel also recommended that Australian health authorities collect fluoride levels in bone so that they could be used to investigate possible effects of fluoride on this tissue over a lifetime of exposure – e.g. arthritis, osteoporosis or bone fractures - (50% of the fluoride we consume each day accumulates there). Again they haven’t done so and so like every other health effect, they are flying blind on these matters.

There is much more I could write about the severe limitations and “oversights” of this NHMRC report but this will suffice for now. I hope this information will be useful to our friends in Australia. I would welcome other comments from readers.

Let me conclude by saying that if I were an Australian taxpayer I would be working hard to stop the funding for this body since whatever interest it serves, it is certainly NOT the public interest. Perhaps some pointed questions in parliament would be a good beginning.

Paul Connett

PS For the record, the NHMRC also exonerated mercury amalgams of causing any harm.
—————————————————-

FLUORIDE ACTION NETWORK
http://www.FluorideAction.net

FAN Bulletin 891: Smoking gun from Australia

November 11, 2007

Dear All,

In haste

I didn’t expect to get out another bulletin before I left today, but I couldn’t pass over this disgusting letter which attempts to fix the NHMRC position on fluoridation. This was sent to me by David McRae. It is a letter from the director of the Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) to Professor Warwick Anderson, Chief Executive Officer, National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), telling him in no uncertain terms that he expects the NHMRC to issue a statement of support for fluoridation. The letter is dated Feb 20 2007, and refers to a meeting in September 2006 where NHMRC members had said that they would be issuing a statement supporting fluoridation. All of this before the “scientific review” of the literature which led to the recent statement from the NHMRC (see FAN bulletin 890)!

So this is how they conduct “scientific reviews” in Australia: first you make up your minds about your position, and then you do the “research” that supports that position. It is called “working backwards from the desired result” or “ the corruption of science.”

What is more important for the NHMRC doing honest science or supporting their friends in high places?

But still the key question remains: how was the NHMRC able to satisfy these pressures and also deal with the damning evidence presented in the NRC(2006) review?

And the other question remains: who is driving this policy in Australia? And why?

Paul Connett
——————-

Smoking gun from Australia

Professor Warwick Anderson,
Chief Executive Officer,
National Health and medical Research Council,
GPO 1421,
CANBERRA, ACT 2601

Dear Professor Anderson

Fluoridation Standards

The Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA) is a forum for the promotion of the health of the public as well as being a professional resource for public health personnel. The PHAA has a strong interest in Oral Health.

The PHAA notes that while State and Territorial governments have made significant commitments recently to progress water fluoridation in Australia, the lack of a current statement of support for water fluoridation by NHMRC is a substantial threat to this work.

Groups opposed to water fluoridation currently refer to the NHMRC response:

“The NH and MRC does not have a separate formal statement about fluoridation of the water supplies” (1) as evidence of a lack of support for water fluoridation.

At the 162 session of the NHMRC in September 2006, members supported the publication of the NHMRC’s support of water fluoridation. PHAA acknowledges that recent NHMRC selective tender for the conduct of a systematic review of fluorides and health in Australia will be the first step in addressing this responsibility for raising the standard of individual and public health.

The Public Health Association of Australia is keen to see this work expedited and would be happy to contribute towards the development of a statement supporting water fluoridation in order to help reduce the confusion around this issue. Equally we would be happy to participate in a public workshop around this issue, as discussed in the 162 session.

We would be happy to talk this issue over with you or your staff should you think that would be helpful. I can be contacted on (02) 62852373 or at plaut@phaa.net.au

Yours sincerely,

Pieta-Ray Laut,
Executive Director
20 February 2007

For reference 1 see footnote on the original letter here.