FAN Bulletin 950
  
April 6, 2008

Dear Supporter,

Before I get to Dr. Cooney, some sad news to relate. We heard from Yvonne McDonald today that  Neil Kay, a long time fighter of fluoridation in New Zealand, has passed away. Neil was 73 and died from a brain tumor. I didn’t get to meet him but I spoke to him once on the phone when I was visiting Ashburton in the South Island. Opponents of fluoridation in NZ spoke very highly of his many years of effort fighting this practice in NZ. He was instrumental in having fluoride removed from Waimairi District years ago. If you wish to pass on your condolences and memories of Neil please send them to Yvonne who was a close friend and at his side when he passed away.

Dr. Peter Cooney, Chief Dental officer for Canada

Dr. Peter Cooney obtained a dental degree (BDS) in Ireland in 1977 and was appointed as the Chief Dental officer for Canada in 2004. This was a new position thought to have been created for the main purpose of promoting and rejuvenating fluoridation (euphemistically described as “improving the oral health status of Canada’s 32 million plus citizens”). Only 42% of the Canadian population received fluoridated water before Quebec City (approx. population: 491,000) ceased the practice a few days ago (April 1). Cooney is also Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Toronto and Chair of the International Chief Dental Officers Public Health Section of the World Dental Federation and is former President of the Canadian Association of Public Health Dentistry.

I crossed paths with Dr. Cooney in a trip to Dryden, Ontario during this past week. This community of 7,000 is about to vote in a referendum on whether to restart fluoridation after a couple of years of having stopped the practice. Cooney gave a presentation in the community center on April 1, for which there was very limited opportunity to ask him questions. On the next day (April 2) I gave a presentation at the same location. Citizens had invited Dr. Cooney to debate me on April 3, which would have provided an excellent culmination of this educational effort. However, it didn’t fit in with his schedule. I look forward to debating him at a place and time which does fit into his schedule, and citizens in Toronto are working on this right now.

In my presentation on April 2, I spent about the first 20 minutes correcting and challenging some of the arguments that Cooney had used the night before, then followed these with an overview of the key arguments against fluoridation along the lines of the Isle of Man debate with Dr. Michael Lennon. Below are my criticisms of Cooney’s enthusiastic endorsement of fluoridation. Hopefully, these will be useful for communities in Canada who have to contend with this man.

Connett’s critique of Dr. Cooney’s presentation promoting fluoridation.

1) Dr. Cooney’s presentation was clearly one-sided. As a civil servant working at the taxpayers’ expense he should not be “spinning” the information. He should leave that to politicians.

2) Dr. Cooney clearly demonstrated his lack of toxicological knowledge in an answer he gave to a question about toxic doses.

He came out with the old chestnut used by fluoridation promoters for over 50 years, when he said that you would have to drink 20,000 liters of water to get a toxic dose. This is utter nonsense. He is confusing a toxic dose with a lethal dose - that is a dose which would kill you and one that would make you sick when consumed over an extended period of time.

You would only need to drink 10 liters of water to reach the Upper Tolerance Limit (UL) set by the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine in 1997 (and I, and many others, have argued that the chronic toxic dose should be set lower than that).  This limit was set for both the US and Canada.

3) He claimed that 60 countries fluoridate. This claim originates with the British Fluoridation Society but when they were challenged, they could not produce a list of 60 countries which fluoridate their water. In fact, only about 30 countries have artificially fluoridated water and only eight countries have more than 50% of the population drinking it (Australia, Columbia, Ireland, Israel, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and the United States)

Most countries have rejected the notion of using the public water supply to deliver medication. 98% of  the population of Western Europe now drinks Non-Fluoridated Water. Some fluoridate their salt but the majority of European countries neither fluoridate their water nor their salt.

(Canada has less than 50% of its population drinking fluoridated water and, as of April 1, 2008, it has even less — since Quebec City has ended it’s fluoridation program.)

4) Cooney claimed that fluoride is a “nutrient.” But to demonstrate that a substance is a “nutrient” you have to deprive an animal or a human being of this substance and demonstrate that some disease occurs. This has never been demonstrated for fluoride. As far as dental disease is concerned, people can have perfectly good teeth without consuming fluoridated water.

5) Cooney claimed that adding fluoride to water is akin to adding iron to certain foodstuffs. These are not comparable. Iron is a known nutrient, fluoride is not.

6) Cooney stated that fluoride “occurs naturally and is found in water, plants soil and various foods.” But just because something occurs naturally does not make it “safe.” Arsenic occurs naturally in certain water supplies - that does not make it safe.

A better guide to what nature considers safe (especially for a new born baby) is the level in mothers’ milk. At 0.004 ppm this is 125 - 200 times less than the level added to water in Canada (0.5 - 0.8 ppm). This means that a baby drinking fluoridated water in Canada is getting up to 200 times the level that nature intended. That is not a wise thing to do. 

7) Cooney stated that research in the 1940’s and 1950s “confirmed that fluoride at optimal levels was nature’s answer to fighting tooth decay.” However, these early studies were seriously flawed and would not get published today. See the late Philip Sutton’s book “The Greatest Fraud: Fluoridation.” Moreover, There has never been a single “double blind/ randomized selected case and control” study demonstrating fluoridation’s effectiveness (or safety).

8) Cooney stated that studies “show that drinking fluoridated water helps reduce tooth decay by 20-40% in children.” However, reporting reductions in tooth decay as percentages can be very misleading.

For example, the largest survey ever conducted in the US - which cost the US taxpayers’ millions of dollars - found only an average 18% difference in tooth decay in the permanent teeth between children who lived all their lives in fluoridated versus non-fluoridated communities. While 18% may sound a lot, it actually represented a saving of just 0.6 of one permanent tooth surface out of approximately 100 tooth surfaces in a child’s mouth (see Brunelle and Carlos, 1990, Table 6)!

9) Cooney cited a long list of organizations which endorse fluoridation. However, endorsements do not constitute science. Many of these organizations have not published their own reviews of the literature and their endorsements merely copy the endorsements of other agencies. Moreover, many of these organizations receive funding from pro-fluoridation governmental sources so their second hand endorsements are highly predictable.

10) Cooney cited the “York Review” from the UK as supporting fluoridation, even though the scientists who worked on the review have publicly argued against such characterizations.

11) Cooney cited the Irish Fluoridation Forum report from 2001 as supporting fluoridation. He actually used the title: “European Fluoridation Forum.”

However, as an invited presenter before this Forum, I know quite a bit about the make up of the panel and the report they produced. The panel consisted largely of government officials (Ireland has had mandatory fluoridation since 1963) and several dental experts known to be pro-fluoridation.

To challenge the objectivity of this panel I asked them to respond in writing to my “50 Reasons to Oppose Fluoridation.” At first they agreed to do this and set up a sub-committee for the purpose, but after 10 months the Forum declared they didn’t have time to respond!

As citizens had anticipated when they saw the composition of the panel, the final report was a rubber stamp for governmental policy. Out of 300 pages the authors devoted only two pages to primary health studies and that was on one tissue only - the bone. They even ignored the study on bone which I went into in some detail in my testimony (Li, et al.,2001).

12) Strikingly absent from Cooney’s presentation was any reference to the National Research Council (2006) 507-page review of “Fluoride in Drinking Water.” When I questioned him about this from the floor he indicated that it was not relevant to Canada because the MCL in Canada is 1.5 ppm which is “much lower” than the American MCL (4 ppm); and the “beneficial” level is set at 0.5 - 0.8 ppm, which is also lower than the American range, 0.7 - 1.2 ppm. When I asked if he could provide me with a written analysis which supports his claim that the NRC’s findings do not bear on the Canadian situation, I was cut off. To ask another question I had to go to the back of the line.

13) Cooney claimed that fluoridation is cost-effective, saving $38 for every $1 spent. However that assumes that it is acceptable to use industrial waste products to fluoridate instead of pharmaceutical grade chemicals (which are much more expensive). 

The calculation also ignores the cost of treating dental fluorosis which can cost up to $1,000 per tooth. It assumes that there are absolutely no health effects whatsoever from drinking fluoridated water over a lifetime.

It also ignores the costs for those (especially those who are sensitive to fluoride) who are forced to use bottled water for drinking and cooking because they want to avoid fluoride. As well as others who don’t want to take a gamble with their children’s health.

Add up all these costs, and this practice is not cost effective at all.

14) Cooney claimed that fluoridation does not cause dental fluorosis of cosmetic concern (which he defined as moderate or severe fluorosis on the Dean scale). I showed data that refutes that (Heller et al., 1997). 

But more importantly he, like most fluoridation promoters, misses the key point. Dental fluorosis is the first indicator that a kid has been over-exposed to fluoride and the real issue is what other damage it may have caused.  In the second part of my talk I explained some of the other tissues  - the brain, the thyroid and the bone -which might be impacted.

15) Cooney used a picture of baby bottle tooth decay (BBTD) several times in his talk to illustrate the teeth of children in non-fluoridated areas. However, fluoridation can do nothing to fight or prevent the ravages of BBTD, a point which he acknowledged the first time he used the picture, but having done so why did he keep using it? BBTD comes about when babies suck on bottles containing sugared water, fruit juice, etc. for hours on end! Such practices are sadly common in low income families, and several studies (Shiboski 2003; Barnes 1992) have shown that water fluoridation does nothing to prevent the condition.

16) In my other question I asked Cooney why, if fluoride was so good for a child’s teeth, that nature had put such a very low level in mothers’ milk (0.004 ppm) which is up to 200 times less than the so called “optimal level.” He replied to the effect that mothers milk was not a perfect meal. To support this surprising claim he said that sometimes mothers milk was short in vitamins. Again, I was cut off before I could explain that if mothers milk was short in any vitamin this is not a general phenomenon but rather it reflects an inadequate diet by the mother. Neither the mother nor the baby can make vitamins in their own bodies - it must be in mother’s diet. However, Cooney’s argument does not explain the fact that ALL mothers are deficient in fluoride, if this is indeed a “nutrient” needed at 0.5 - 0.8 ppm in the fluids that the baby drinks.

17) Instead of Canada spending a lot of taxpayers’ money sending Cooney around the country promoting fluoridation, they would do far better to spend these precious resources on studying the health of fluoridated communities. In 60 years of fluoridation they have done very little in this regard. For example there are NO published Canadian studies which have examined a possible relationship between fluoride ingested from water and other sources and a whole range of health concerns, many of which were documented in the NRC (2006) report.

18) Nor is Canada tracking the build-up of fluoride in the tissues of Canadians even while they are doing this for many other toxic pollutants. It is almost as if the government was saying we are concerned about following the pollutants from industry but we are not interested in following the pollutant the Canadian government sanctions putting deliberately into the drinking water.

Both Dr. Cooney’s presentation and mine were videotaped by Shaw Cable TV and should be broadcast in the next few days.

I hope this critique is helpful for our Canadian friends. I am happy to say that the opponents of fluoridation in Dryden are very well organized and they have very strong support from the council and the water department. Three of the operators of the plant have signed the Professionals’ Statement calling for an end to fluoridation worldwide. See www.Fluoridealert.org/professionals.statement.html

On the morning of my first presentation, a letter appeared in the local paper signed by 9 local doctors supporting fluoridation. None of these doctors attended either my April 2 or 3 meetings. I think that their failure to attend either meeting is a huge disservice to the community they serve. It is also a word of warning to others to be very wary of personal endorsements like these, unless you are certain that they come after a careful and objective reading of the literature, rather than someone simply doing their dental colleagues a favor.

Paul Connett