FAN Bulletin 1059

March 25, 2009

Dear Steve,

Here is part 3 of our series “Why we doubt the benefits of swallowing fluoride” which is a response to the claim in a European Commission document: “Working Mandate on fluoridation” that “no one doubts the beneficial effects of fluoride” - see http://fluoridealert.org/eu.docs.html

Before we get to that there is more important news from Canada where the issue is positively bubbling.

1) From the province of Quebec, Gilles Parent, ND, reports:

Dear Paul,

Here is news of growing opposition to fluoridation in Quebec, much of it sparked by an effort to fluoridate Gatineau and the Ciity Commission set up to investigate the issue. The following have made their opposition to fluoridation public:

1) “Eau Secours” for which I am the spokesperson. This group has formally come against fluoridation and we now have one full time paid employee documenting all the information on the issue.

2) Quebec Water Technicians Association (Association quebecoise des technique de l’eau, AQTE)

3) Le conseil régional de l’environnement et du développement durable de l’Outaouais (CREDDO)

4) The Reseau Environnement

5) The Gatineau City Department of Infrastructure and Environment

And - this must be a premiere for North America -

6) Three major Quebec cities took a stand against it at the commission: Montreal, Longueuil and Sherbrooke.

Meanwhile, the report of the Gatineau Commission on fluoridation held under the direction of Mr. Phillion has been delayed from February to June.  They had to hire a firm, Golder, to prepare a synthesis due to the amount of documents presented.  

This synthesis is quite informative.  We have learned that some public health authorities admit that dental fluorosis is an issue but claim that a reduction to 0.6 or 0.7 ppm will reduce the risk. However, they don’t provide any analysis to support this claim.

We have to respond to the synthesis.  Many important aspects were not included in the criteria to be evaluated, e.g. the nature of flurosilicate.

We have used the recent statement by Dr Tenenbaum that fluorosilicates were not tested for toxicity because they were nutrients and nutrients don’t have to be tested for toxicity.  But one line further down he stated that it is a chemical product!

More to come as we are preparing an important complaint against the Environment Ministry.

Gilles

2) From the province of Alberta, there comes news of exciting developments in Calgary.

See “Calgary’s fluoride battle heats up again at council - Aldermen cite growing expense,” by Joel Kom, Calgary Herald, March 25, 2009
http://www2.fluoridealert.org/Alert/Canada/Alberta/Calgary-s-fluoride-battle-heats-up-again-at-council

3) Some Good news and some Bad news from Ontario.

The Good News. The brand new water plant of West Elgin Water System (towns of Glencoe, West Lorne, Dutton, Eagle) was commissioned last  week without fluoridation as part of the process. The practice was abandoned when the plant was constructed. Money and chemical handling problems were cited as reasons for ceasing fluoridation. So we can four more towns which have stopped fluoridation in Ontario.

The Bad News (with some good news thrown in). At a public meeting last night Norfolk County legislators voted to continue fluoridation but NOT to expand the service to the three non-fluoridated drinking water systems in the County ? see http://www2.fluoridealert.org/Alert/Canada/Ontario/Simcoe-and-Delhi-All-talk-no-action
 
Again may we request that you to send in the following message to the European Commission committee that is reviewing the toxicity of fluoride, preceded with a short note about who you are (experience with this issue and/or your professional qualifications). Note we have made a slight concession on the presence of dental researchers being part of this panel. Please bcc us at info@fluoridealert.org

Comments on the  ”Working Mandate on fluoridation” (http://fluoridealert.org/eu.docs.html)

Send the following message to: Sanco-Sc8-Secretariat@ec.europa.eu

Dear Members of the Fluoridation committee,

You have asked for comments on your “Working Mandate on fluoridation”

(your personal preamble here)

 I am alarmed by the way the erroneous claim that “no one doubts the beneficial effects of fluoride” was slipped into your “Working Mandate on fluoridation.” This phrase suggests to me that the dental lobby is already influencing this process. In order to regain the public’s trust in this process, please remove this phrase because it is simply untrue. Please also make sure a balanced panel of toxicologists, neurologists, physiologists, and biologists review the new information on fluoride’s harmful effects and the Working Mandate. I also request that any further role dentists or dental researchers play on your panel, be restricted to their input on dental fluorosis and whatever scientific documentation they can provide which has convinced them that while this visible aspect of fluoride’s toxicity is manifesting itself it has not adversely affected any other tissues in the body. It is absolutely essential in my view that dentists should not be part of any discussions of fluoride’s impact on tissues and organs, for which they have no expertise, and because they have a sad history of bias on the whole fluoridation issue.

Your name etc.

Paul Connett

Why we doubt the benefits of swallowing fluoride, part 3

18. Early trials and Dean’s 21-city study.
 
A great deal of the conviction that fluoridation works has been derived from two sources: Dean’s famous 21-city study (Dean, 1942) and the early fluoridation trials in the US, Canada and New Zealand. However, both the legitimacy and the quality of the methodologies used in these have been questioned.
 
19. Dean’s study has been questioned.
 
In describing Dean’s early work the CDC states that:
 
“Dean compared the prevalence of fluorosis with data collected by others on dental caries prevalence among children in 26 states (as measured by DMFT) and noted a strong inverse relation (10). This cross-sectional relation was confirmed in a study of 21 cities in Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio (11).” (CDC, 1999).
 
This raises the question: if Dean had access to data from 26 states, why did he end up using data from ONLY 21 cities?
 
Rudolf Ziegelbecker, an Austrian statistician, who sadly passed away a few weeks ago, pursued this issue. When he added in all the data he could find from the US and Europe, which related tooth decay with fluoride levels in the water, the inverse relationship reported by Dean disappeared. However, when he examined the same data for dental fluorosis he found a very robust relationship. (Ziegelbecker,1981). Thus one relationship (between fluoride levels and dental fluorosis) holds up over the “background noise”, the other (fluoride levels and dental decay) does not.

20. The early trials.
 
The trials conducted in 1945 -1955 in the US, and Canada, which helped to launch fluoridation, have been heavily criticized for their poor methodology and poor choice of control communities (De Stefano 1954; Sutton 1959, 1960 and 1996; Ziegelbecker 1970). According to Dr. Hubert Arnold, a statistician from the University of California at Davis, the early fluoridation trials:
 
“are especially rich in fallacies, improper design, invalid use of statistical methods, omissions of contrary data, and just plain muddleheadedness and hebetude (hebetude is mental lethargy or dullness, PC).”  (Arnold, 1980)
 
Some examples of poor methodology in the early trials.
 
In two trials the control communities were fluoridated before the trial had been completed.
 
Furthermore, when the Grand Rapids trial began in 1945, children from all 79 schools in Grand Rapids were examined. By 1949, however, examiners observed children from only 25 of these 79 schools. Meanwhile in Muskegon, children from ALL the schools were still being examined.
 
Such problematic changes and inconsistencies in sampling size is further illustrated by the fact that when the Grand Rapids study commenced, the number of 12 to 16 year olds being examined was 7,661, but by the final year of the study, the number of 12 to 16 year olds being studied had dropped to just 1,031 (Sutton 1996).
 
Along with these arbitrary changes in the study’s sampling methods, the study employed multiple examiners to assess the children’s teeth. But as was known at the time, studies from the American Journal of Public Health (Boyd et al., 1951) as well as the Journal of the American Dental Association (Radusch, 1934), there is a considerable variability between each dentists’ assessment of a person’s teeth.
 
Despite these enormous weaknesses, these early studies are cited again and again to support the success of fluoridation. As Benjamin Nesin, Director of the New York State Water Laboratories, stated at the time,
 
“It must be emphasized that the fluoridation hypothesis in its entirety rests on a very narrow base of selected experimental information. It is this very base which is vulnerable to scientific criticism. And it is upon this very narrow base that the impressive array of endorsement rests like an inverted pyramid (Nesin 1956).”
 
Sutton’s monographs on this matter (Sutton, 1959, 1960) have never been successfully refuted by proponents, even though they have tried. Sutton’s work was re-published in book form shortly before he died in 1996. The book also contains some of the letters and articles which attempted to rebut Sutton’s work and his responses.
 
21. The Hastings-Napier trial a fraud.
 
The Hastings-Napier trial was conducted in the 1950s and was used to successfully promote fluoridation throughout New Zealand. However, it has now been shown to be fraudulent (Colquhoun and Mann, 1986; Colquhoun PhD thesis, 1987). The control community (Napier) was dropped two years after the trial began and the huge drop in tooth decay found in Hastings was found to be due to an artifact involving a change in methodology used to characterize tooth decay before and after the trial (i.e. diagnosing tooth decay was less stringent at the end of the trial than at the beginning). The fact that the methodology had been changed was NOT acknowledged by the authors when they published their report ? which in our book constitutes fraud (Ludwig, 1958, 1959. 1962, 1963, 1965, 1971; Colquhoun, 1987).

22. Modern Studies.
 
If we shift to more modern times, a major development occurred in 1980. This was when Dr. John Colquhoun was sent by his superiors in New Zealand on a four month world tour to investigate tooth decay in several different continents, including Australia, Asia, North America and Europe. He was expected to bring back with him evidence that would prove once and for all that fluoridation worked. He failed to do so.
 
23. Colquhoun’s work  (1980- 1997)
 
In 1980 Colquhoun was the principal dental officer for Auckland, NZ’s largest city. Both as a dental officer and as a city councilor he had avidly and successfully promoted fluoridation throughout the country.
 
When Colquhoun went on his world tour, to his dismay, researchers reported to him ? behind the scenes - that they were not finding the difference in tooth decay between fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities that they had expected ? in fact they were finding very little difference at all.
 
When Colquhoun returned to NZ he was given a summary of tooth decay for the whole of the country. NZ is a little unusual in this respect since under their national health service they monitor tooth decay for ALL children at the ages of 5 and 12. So this was not a sample survey but a complete record.
 
When Colquhoun looked at the complete record of tooth decay in NZ, he found no difference in tooth decay between the fluoridated and non-fluoridated cities. If anything, the teeth were slightly better in the non-fluoridated communities.
 
When Colquhoun’s assistants reported to him the extensive amount of dental fluorosis occurring in fluoridated Auckland, he risked his pension by deciding to make the lack of fluoridation’s effectiveness public. To his enormous credit he spent the rest of his life trying to undo the damage he had done by reversing his position on fluoridation, and opposing it in any scientific way he could.
 
Paul Connett interviewed Colquhoun on videotape in Auckland in 1997 shortly before he died (see Colquhoun videotape, Connett, 1997).
 
Colquhoun wrote up his findings in several published papers (Colquhoun 1984, 1985, 1987, 1990, 1992 and 1995) and after he retired he obtained a PhD (1987). His research thesis examined the history of fluoridation in New Zealand. He offered Thomas Kuhn’s famous analysis: “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” to explain the reluctance of the dental community to change its paradigm on fluoridation’s safety and effectiveness in NZ . In his thesis Colquhoun also exposed the rigged nature of the Hastings-Napier fluoridation trial (discussed above).
 
Colquhoun summarized his evolution from being an ardent supporter of fluoridation to one of its most articulate critics in, “Why I changed My Mind on Fluoridation” a paper published in 1997.

End of Part 3.

Most references can be found at http://www.fluoridealert.org/health/biblio.html