The Truth About Fluoride Becoming More Widely Known
March 30, 2014
Story at-a-glance
Fluoride is a poisonous chemical added to many municipal
water supplies across the US, Canada, and elsewhere
without the permission of the residents
One of the consequences of this mass-medication is
dental fluorosis, which is present in 41 percent of 12-
to 15-year-olds in the US
37 studies out of 43 show water fluoridation lowers IQ
in children; 26 studies show a statistically significant
reduction in IQ of seven points
Since about 2009, about 130 communities have stopped
water fluoridation. The new minister of health in Israel
announced that this year, she’s lifting the mandatory
fluoride requirement in Israel
Queensland recently lifted the mandatory requirement for
fluoridation, which led to 17 district councils stopping
fluoridation (or deciding not to start)
By Dr. Mercola
Fluoride is a poisonous substance added to many municipal water
supplies across the US, Canada, and elsewhere without the permission
of the residents. Is there a model that communities can follow to
remove it from their water supply? The short answer to this question
is yes.
Dr. Paul Connett, a chemist by training and director of the
Fluoride Action Network (FAN), is recognized worldwide as a leader
in the movement to eliminate
fluoride from municipal water supplies, and I'm pleased to be
working with him to achieve this goal.
He's been active in this area for decades, becoming an
environmental activist shortly after joining St. Lawrence University
in 1983. In 1985, he got involved with the Zero Waste movement,
fighting incineration and promoting alternatives to waste burning.
Those earlier efforts recently culminated in the publication of
the book, The Zero Waste Solution: Untrashing the Planet One
Community at a Time.1
Then, in 1996, his wife alerted him to the problems of water
fluoridation.
"I started to read what she'd given me, and I was
embarrassed that I had fallen victim of this American
brainwashing," he says. "The American message from the
public health establishment is that everybody in the world says
fluoridation is great.
They forgot the fact that most of the world does not
fluoridate; 97 percent of Europe does not fluoridate, thank you
very much. The other tactic has been to denigrate opponents of
fluoridation – flat earth society, crazy people. And I
apologize, because I fell victim to that."
Countering the Status Quo
The book,
The Case Against Fluoride, was the culmination of years of
joint investigation by Dr. Connett and James Beck, an MD, Ph.D.
physicist from Calgary, and Spedding Micklem, who has a doctorate in
biology from Oxford. In addition to a clear discussion about the
toxic effects of fluoride, it contains 80 pages-worth of references
to the scientific literature on fluoride.
The primary strategy that promoters of water fluoridation use is
to establish that authorities say: "It's good; it's safe and
effective," and that "people who oppose fluoridation are stupid,
stupid, stupid." This strategy is basically aimed at keeping you
from looking at the actual science.
"What the Fluoride Action Network has done, and done in
spades, is we made the literature readily available – not just a
little of it, but all of it," Dr. Connett says.
"Even material that is pro-fluoridation is accessible
through our website. If anybody wants to check that out, go to
our website, FluorideAlert.org. On the top right hand corner of
the homepage, you'll see a button that says Researchers.
If you click on that, you'll get a menu of issues. In
that menu, if you click on Health Effects Database, you get
another menu of all the tissues that fluoride could interfere
with. It's a tremendous database.
...My son is now going to archives around the country,
digging up the information that's being suppressed. We now know
that, for years, they've been suppressing information about the
harm that fluoride causes.
The industry hid information that fluoride was damaging
the workers of the aluminum, steel, and other industries, with
the help of the Sloan-Kettering Institute and the Mellon
Institute of Industrial Research.
These institutes do research for industry, but only
publish the results that are favorable to industry, and hide the
results that were not favorable. And of course, what's sickening
about all of this is that there was collusion between these
people that were hiding the information and the US Public Health
Service. The very service that they set up to protect your
health was colluding with industry to suppress information."
Recent Victories
Since about 2009, about 130 communities have stopped water
fluoridation. Canada has dropped from about 60 percent of the
population drinking fluoridated water down to about 32-33 percent.
Victories have also been logged in New Zealand and across the US.
Four major developments in the last 13 to 14 months include:
Last year's success in Portland, OR, where efforts to start
water fluoridation were thwarted despite the pro-fluoride side
spending about one million dollars to force the issue. They were
even paying local associations $20,000 just to come out in
support of fluoridation. Fortunately, their scheme didn't work,
and Portland is now the largest city in the US that does not
fluoridate its water
Wichita, Kansas also won its battle against fluoridation
last year, after getting 60 percent of the votes in the
referendum, despite being considerably outspent by the fluoride
proponents
Queensland lifted the mandatory requirement for
fluoridation, which opened the floodgates and led to 17 district
councils stopping fluoridation (or deciding not to start). In
total, this affects about 45 different towns
The new minister of health in Israel announced that this
year, she's lifting the mandatory fluoride requirement in
Israel. Hopefully, this will lead to many communities ending
their water fluoridation programs.
Each Victory is Paving the Way for More Successes Elsewhere
There are also exciting and highly creative developments going on
in Ireland, where politicians are now trying to end fluoridation.
Each victory adds to the arsenal of successful strategies that can
help other communities to follow suit, even against formidable odds.
As Dr. Connett explains:
"There's a tremendous generosity amongst the communities
that are fighting fluoridation. The people in Wichita, after
getting a victory, helped the people in Portland. Now the people
in Portland are helping other communities. They are sharing the
educational material that they used, and some of them are very
creative.Clint Griess in California has a teleconference once a
month, where people all over the world can join on the phone and
hear these experiences.
They hear from the activist in Portland, Wichita, and
Canada – including my co-author, James Beck from Calgary. He was
able to get it out of Calgary. That was 1.2 million people free
of fluoridation. I think it's probably the Internet that will
end fluoridation. They just cannot hide the information any
longer."
It's worth remembering that if a product is really good, its
benefits usually speak for themselves. You don't need to intimidate
people into buying it or using it. You don't have to hide
information relating to its effects. Such is not the case with
fluoride, where every dirty tactic in the book has been and
continues to be employed to keep it in use.
Curacao Takes on Fluoridation
At the time of this interview, Dr. Connett was in Curacao, an
island in the Caribbean just north of South America with a
population of about 140,000, where community leaders have formed a
team to rid the island of fluoridation. Curacao was a Dutch colony
at one point. The Netherlands began water fluoridation in the '60s,
but stopped it in the '70s. Hans Moolenburgh, a doctor from
Amsterdam, wrote a book about it, called Fluoride: The Freedom
Fight . However, when fluoridation ended in the Netherlands, it
was not stopped in Curacao.
"I said to them, 'This is something that we're doing to
ourselves.' Many toxic threats are things that are inadvertent
that are being done to us by other things, but in this case,
this [is a] toxin we're giving to ourselves, and nowhere is that
more bizarre than in Curacao," Dr. Connett says.
"When you're travelling from the airport to the hotel,
you pass this huge [water treatment] plant. That plant is taking
seawater, distilling it, pushing it through reverse osmosis to
get pure drinking water, and then they dump hazardous waste from
the phosphate fertilizer industry in it to fluoridate this
water. I mean, is that Monty Python or what? It's as easy to
stop this as turning off a tap. But to turn off that tap, you
need the political will of the decision makers."
In this case, should the need arise, pro bono lawyers are also
prepared to bring a lawsuit based on the premise that it's
unconstitutional to force medicine on people without their informed
consent. But before suing, most communities are best off going
through the local political process to end water fluoridation. Here,
there are no shortcuts. It requires education, organization,
dedication, and perseverance.
Total Video Length: 40:08
Fluoridation Is Forced Medication Without Consent
What needs to be communicated to your local councilors is that,
by and large, they (the councilors) are not medically educated. They
know little about toxicology. What right do they have to play doctor
to the whole community? The evidence that fluoride causes harm is
growing. But before councilors get bogged down in trying to
understand which side of the argument has the best or most accurate
information, they need to answer the question of: do they have the
right to do what a doctor is not permitted to do—i.e. to medicate
people without their consent?
"Keep it simple," Dr. Connett advises. "No, they
do not have the right to force medication. To put a medicine in
the drinking water defies many aspects of medicine. You can't
control the dose. You can't control who gets it. It goes to
everybody, including bottle-fed babies."
CDC statistics also show that African-Americans and
Mexican-Americans are more susceptible to dental fluorosis, for
whatever reason. Dental fluorosis is a clearly visible side effect
of excessive fluoride exposure. But there are also many side effects
you cannot see. One of the consequences of this mass-medication is
dental fluorosis, which is present in 41 percent of 12- to
15-year-olds in the US, according to Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) data.
8.6 percent of those children have it in the mild form,
where up to 50 percent of the tooth enamel impacted
3.6 percent of them have moderate or severe dental
fluorosis, where up to 100 percent of the enamel is affected
Why Are Community Leaders Rooting for Reducing Children's IQ?
At present, 37 studies out of 43 done in China, India, Iran, and
Mexico show water fluoridation lowers IQ in children. Even the
lowest level of fluoride assessed in these studies – 1.8 parts per
million– lowered IQ.
"That gives you no margin of safety to protect all the
kids in the United States, or any large population," Dr.
Connett says. "One of the things a toxicologist has to do is
to apply a margin of safety to protect everybody, because some
kids are going to be at least 10 times more sensitive than other
kids. Once you've got the level that has caused harm, you've got
to apply safety factors of at least 10 or probably 100...
[T]here's no way you could condone the drinking of fluoridated
water against this harm of lowering your IQ. This is very
serious."
A Harvard study evaluated 27 of these studies. Twenty-six of the
27 studies showed a statistically significant reduction in IQ of
seven points. Dr. Connett notes that if you shift the IQ of an
entire population downward by just five IQ points, you will have
halved the number of geniuses in society, and you double the number
of mentally handicapped. To lose half of your brightest individuals,
and double the number of people who needs special services certainly
has enormous social and economic ramifications for a country like
the United States in the global economy.
Why Won't the EPA Do an Honest Job?
According to Dr. Connett, the entire issue of water fluoridation
could be overturned in a day, figuratively speaking, if the US
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) division of water was to do an
honest job.
"In 2006, the National Research Council (NRC) told the
EPA water division, who paid for their review, 'Your safe
drinking water standard and goal of 4 parts per million is not
protective of health. You need to do a new risk assessment to
establish a safe level.' They had a whole chapter on the brain.
They included five of the IQ studies. We now have 37...
Now, if the EPA was to take the IQ studies, apply the
standard techniques of risk assessment, margin of safety
analysis, and determine a new safe maximum contaminant level
goal (MCLG), it would have to be zero, and it would end
fluoridation tomorrow in the United States and almost certainly
around the world. We are that close. But between us and that
decision is a word called 'integrity,' or 'honesty'...
Don't give us a watered-down version designed to protect
water fluoridation program, which is what they've hinted at a
press conference in January 7, 2011. The deputy administrator of
the EPA water division said, 'We need to protect children's
teeth. We need to protect the water fluoridation program.' No!
He needs to protect our health, our babies, our brains, and our
intelligence."
More Information
There are so many resources out there now that pro-fluoride
advocates are quickly running out of options besides name-calling
and intimidation. Again, FAN has created a phenomenal database of
available fluoride-related research, both pro and con, expanding
even into fluoride sources other than water, such as pesticides and
other chemicals. You can search the database by logging onto
www.FluorideAlert.org,
and selecting the Researchers button in the top right corner. You
can also pick up a copy of Dr. Connett's book,
The Case Against Fluoride. All of this now easily available
research clearly shows that:
Water fluoridation does not work to prevent cavities
Fluoride works when topically applied only
There are unacceptable risks involved in the practice of
water fluoridation