Myths We Cherish: "Fluoridated Water Is Healthy For Us."

(It's also important to understand that the fluoride added to municipal water is not pharmaceutical-grade, but rather hazardous waste brews containing fluorides from metals, fertilizer, and other industries.)

See [www.amazon.com] for book description, reviews, and sample pages.
The Hundred-Year Lie
How to Protect Yourself from the Chemicals That Are Destroying Your Health (June 2007)
by Randall Fitzgerald (for biography see [www.hundredyearlie.com] )

Excerpts, p. 130:
Myths We Cherish:
FLUORIDATED WATER IS HEALTHY FOR US

One of the more memorable and hilarious scenes in the early 1960s satirical movie Dr. Strangelove featured a monologue by a U.S. military general ranting and raving about the necessity to protect “our precious bodily fluids” from contamination by fluoride in drinking water, presumably because the drug had been placed there as part of a Communist plot to control the world.

Ridiculing people who feared the health effects of fluoridated water by labeling them a lunatic fringe proved extraordinarily effective for many decades in protecting fluoride from serious scrutiny. After all, we were constantly being assured by authority figures in medicine, government, and industry that consuming fluoride was not only safe, it would help to assure that we maintained good dental health. Who could argue with that?

About 66 percent of public municipal water systems in the United States serving 170 million people had been fluoridated by the dawn of the twenty-first century, yet most of the countries in Western Europe --- from France and Germany to Italy and Switzerland --- continued to refuse adding fluoride to their drinking water. Did they know something we refuse to accept?

It might be useful to recall how fluoridation came about in the first place. A scientist working under a grant from the Aluminum Company of America made the initial public proposal in 1939 to add fluoride to public water supplies in the belief that it would help prevent tooth decay. In 1945 the first barrels of sodium fluoride were added to the drinking water in Grand Rapids, Michigan. When the United States Public Health Service endorsed fluoridation a few years later, many cities and entire states quickly followed that advice.

There was an ulterior motive for the aluminum industry and the fertilizer industry to promote the fluoridation idea. A bi-product of factory smokestacks operated by both industries was a toxic waste called silicofluoride that contained lead, arsenic, and other toxins. Instead of these industries having to pay for disposal of this waste (today at an estimated cost of $8,000 a truckload), fluoridation enabled both to make money by selling the waste for use in public water supplies.

Using public water as a vehicle to deliver a drug – and one that is among the most toxic substances on the planet, used as an active ingredient in many pesticides – was an idea that concerned some physicians and scientists at the time. It even initially drew opposition from the dental profession. A 1994 editorial in The Journal of The American Dental Association warned that water fluoridation’s prospects for harming human health “far outweigh those for the good”

Once dentists came aboard the fluoridation bandwagon along with public-health minded politicians, and with backing from a public relations campaign funded by aluminum and fertilizer industry coffers, there was no stopping the fluoridation juggernaut. Industry-funded studies began to appear in dental and medical journals showing improvement in dental health apparently resulting from fluoridated water, and that was all the proof most people needed to accept fluoridation’s benefits as the gospel truth. Anyone who disagreed was branded a right-wing nut.

Periodically a courageous voice with impeccable scientific credentials spoke up to sound an alarm about fluoridation’s potential dangers, only to be dismissed as eccentric. In 1975, for instance, the chief chemist emeritus of The National Cancer Institute, Dean Burke, declared that fluoride in water “causes more human cancer, and causes it faster, than any other chemical”.

Two years later some members of congress inquired about whether federal health authorities, after a quarter-century of experience with fluoridation, had ever tested fluoridated water as a cause of cancer. The answer was no. More than a decade passed before these tests were finally performed. The results caused a brief uproar. Young male rats exposed to fluoridated water developed both bone cancer and liver cancer.

These results were quickly attacked on a variety of grounds – flawed methodology, incomplete results, animal studies aren’t always reliable, etc. – and then ignored by the fluoridation establishment. But other researchers, emboldened by the precedent this study set, began conducting their own experiments into fluoride’s effects on health. In 1992, three U.S. scientists found evidence of Alzheimer’s-like symptoms in laboratory animals exposed to fluoridated water that had apparently carried traces of aluminum into the animals’ brains. That same year a study appeared in The Journal of The American Medical Association connecting water fluoridation to an increased risk of hip fractures.

The negative studies about fluoride’s effects on health built into a tsunami during the 1990s. Here are just a few examples: the medical journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology found evidence that fluoride accumulates in the human body and creates motor-skills dysfunction and learning disabilities. Two separate studies in the journal Fluoride showed that in areas where water supplies were fluoridated, children’s IQs were lower than normal. Other science papers in Fluoride drew connections between the chemical and thyroid abnormalities, arthritis, even Down’s syndrome in children.

Even the argument that put fluoride into drinking water in the first place – that it prevents tooth decay – came under sustained challenge. A study in 1995 by the California Department of Health Services revealed that money spent on dental work actually increased in ares where water was fluoridated in that state, while dental costs declined in communities without fluoridated water. In the July 2000 issue of The Journal of The American Dental Association John D. Featherstone of the University of California at San Francisco concluded that ingesting fluoride from tap water does little to prevent tooth decay.

By 2004, an estimated five hundred peer-reviewed scientific studies had appeared indicating health problems associated with fluoride consumption. Rather than accept the possibility that water fluoridation may be a flawed idea, fluoride’s proponents have continued reacting with a sort of Dr. Strangelove logic that relies upon dismissive ridicule.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/09/2013 03:53PM by Erling.

Surgeons General Statements on Community Water Fluoridation
The past five Surgeons General supported community water fluoridation and encouraged communities to fluoridate their water. Here are the most recent three statements.

2004, Richard H. Carmona, MD, MPH, FACS, VADM, USPHS

2001, David Satcher, MD, PhD

1995, Audrey F. Manley, MD, MPH

[www.cdc.gov]