FAN Bulletin 951
  
April 9, 2008

Dear Supporter,

Today I sent the following letter to Dr. Julie Gerberding, the director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The letter asks, among other things,  for any written analysis produced by CDC - or any other agency on which they rely - which could possibly justify the CDC’s extraordinary claim on their web site that:
“The findings of the NRC report are consistent with CDC’s assessment that water is safe and healthy at the levels used for water fluoridation (0.7 - 1.2 mg/L).”
Meanwhile, a newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina published a cover story today on the historic and scientific importance of the NRC review to the fluoridation debate. The article is available online at: http://columbiacitypaper.com/Cover-Story/Current-Issue/Clear-Danger.html

Paul Connett

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Dear Dr. Gerberding,

It is now over two years since I sent you the letter copied below. Would you please let me know if you have established any group within your agency to independently overview the work of the Oral Health Division (OHD) with respect to water fluoridation? As I am sure you are aware the OHD continues to aggressively promote fluoridation throughout the country. However, there is no evidence that it has either the expertise or willingness to review objectively the ever increasing amount of scientific literature which indicates that this practice is not safe for everyone.

In the last year and half alone, studies were published from China (Wang SX, et al., 2007), India (Trivedi MH, et al., 2007), Iran (Seraj B, et al., 2006) and Mexico (Rocha-Amador D, et al, 2007) which indicated that the IQ of children is being lowered by consumption of natural fluoride in their drinking water. These studies are consistent with an increasing number of animal studies that indicate fluoride can damage the brain and several other studies from China which have found the same relationship with lowering IQ in children ( http://www.fluoridealert.org/health/brain/ ). While these effects were observed for levels of fluoride above those added to water in America, there is no adequate margin of safety to protect everyone in society - which includes the very young, the very old, those with impaired kidney function, those with poor diet and those with borderline iodine deficiency - from these and other health effects documented in the review by the National Research Council (NRC, 2006).

Nowhere is the “conflict of interest” in your OHD more glaringly obvious than its claim - issued on the CDC website just six days after the NRC (2006) report was released (http://www.cdc.gov/fluoridation/safety/nrc_report.htm ) - that:
“The findings of the NRC report are consistent with CDC’s assessment that water is safe and healthy at the levels used for water fluoridation (0.7 - 1.2 mg/L).”

Such a statement confuses the difference between concentration and dose, and totally ignores the reality that some people drink far more water than the average, that people get fluoride from many other sources than water and that there are subsets of the population who are far more vulnerable to fluoride’s toxic effects than others. Furthermore, it is disingenuous to contrast the difference between 1 ppm and 4 ppm, when in fact the NRC panel recommended that the 4 ppm MCLG be lowered.

Moreover, three members of the NRC panel, including the primary authors of the key chapters on the brain and the endocrine system, have since gone on public record as saying that their report was relevant to water fluoridation and that the practice should be halted worldwide (http://fluoridealert.org/professionals.statement.html). Furthermore, the quote from the chairman of the NRC panel, Dr. John Doull, as cited in the January, 2008 issue of Scientific American, further underlines the cavalier attitude of the CDC’s Oral Health Division in these matters, when he says:
“What the committee found is that we’ve gone with  the status quo regarding fluoride for many years-for too long, really-and  now we need to take a fresh look…In the scientific community,  people tend to think this is settled. I mean, when the U.S. surgeon general  comes out and says this is one of the 10 greatest achievements of the 20th  century, that’s a hard hurdle to get over.  But when we looked at the  studies that have been done, we found that many of these questions are unsettled and we have much less information than we should, considering how  long this [fluoridation] has been going on. I think that’s why fluoridation  is still being challenged so many years after it began. In the face of  ignorance, controversy is rampant.”
In light of the above is it not time that someone in your agency - other than the OHD - revisited the status quo position on fluoridation and started to address some of these “questions which are unsettled” instead of blindly continuing this practice?

Has any written analysis of the NRC (2006) report been conducted at the CDC which goes beyond the very short statement which appeared on the CDC web page on March 28, 2006? If so, would you please provide me a copy of this written analysis?

Thank you for your consideration in this matter and I look forward to an early reply. For obvious reasons I am seeking a response from you on this matter and not from Dr. William Mass, director of the OHD.

Sincerely,

Dr. Paul Connett

References:
   
CDC (2006). CDC Statement on the 2006 National Research Council (NRC) Report on Fluoride in Drinking Water, http://www.cdc.gov/fluoridation/safety/nrc_report.htm , accessed March 23, 2008.

Fagin, D. Second Thoughts about Fluoride, Scientific American, January 2008, pages 74-81

Rocha-Amador D, et al. (2007). Decreased intelligence in children and exposure to fluoride and arsenic in drinking water. Cadernos de Saude Publica 23(Suppl 4):S579-87.

Seraj B, et al. (2006). Effect of high fluoride concentration in drinking water on children’s intelligence. Journal of Dental Medicine 19(2):80-86.

Trivedi MH, et al. (2007). Effect of high fluoride water on intelligence of school children in India. Fluoride 40(3):178-183.

Wang SX, et al. (2007). Arsenic and fluoride exposure in drinking water: children’s IQ and growth in Shanyin county, Shanxi province, China. Environmental Health Perspectives 115(4):643-7.

NRC (2006) “Fluoride in Drinking Water” http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11571