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A leading authority on fluoridation explains the threat that tap water can pose to your child's development including the fact that bottle-fed infants whose formula contains fluoridated tap water may be ingesting 250 times as much fluoride as those who are breast-fed, and the alarming implications this has for brain development.

Partial government flip-flop on fluoridation
forces media to acknowledge critics’ claims

Commentary by CFK Editor BILL BONVIE

CFK News 1.11.11

(This is a slightly revised version of the original that includes some corrections and added information.) 

After a more than 60-year run in the mainstream media, is it possible that the fluoridation fable may finally have begun to unravel?

Last Friday’s stunning announcement of an unprecedented recommendation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that the levels of fluoride added to drinking water be significantly lowered has lent new legitimacy to what detractors have been claiming about a program Americans have long been told represents one of the greatest public health achievements of the last century.

The recommendation was apparently triggered by alarm bells over the adverse effects that the amounts of fluoride routinely dumped into municipal water supplies in about two-thirds of the country might actually be having on children’s teeth. That’s right, adverse effects.

Whereas health authorities – including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the American Medical Association and the American Dental Association – have maintained for decades that levels within a 0.7 to 1.2 milligram (parts per million) range per liter of water were perfectly safe as well as necessary to prevent cavities, what this announcement has done is to effectively retract that long-standing assurance.

Now, government health officials are cautioning that levels higher than .07 milligrams may cause children to develop a condition known as dental fluorosis, in which teeth become brittle, discolored and prone to break.

Actually, critics of the program have been warning about the dangers of dental fluororsis for many years, as well as of many other health risks that fluoride, a toxic chemical derived largely from hazardous industrial wastes, posed to the nation’s children and adults. But this partial flip-flop on fluoridation marks the first time in this misguided program’s decades-old history that there has been any real acknowledgement by the health bureaucracy that such opposition might have some basis in reality.

What prompted it at this particular time isn’t quite clear, but a burgeoning rate of dental fluorosis in children seems to have been the tipping point. Whatever the motivation, the announcement can be considered a victory for many dedicated EPA staffers and scientists who have long recognized the dangers associated with the addition of fluoride to the water supply, given their knowledge of fluoride’s toxic properties and the fact that the maximum contaminant level set by their agency was a mere four parts per million(which it  wilkl now be reviewing to determine if a lower number is also in order for that as well), 

A little over a decade ago, in fact, the union representing toxicologists, biologists, chemists and other professionals at EPA headquarters voted unanimously to cosponsor an initiative to reverse a 1995 California law mandating fluoridation in certain locales, citing a causal link between fluoride exposure and cancer, genetic damage, neurological impairment bone pathology and lowered IQs in children.

Up to now, however, such opposition within the EPA has run counter to prevailing government gospel that fluoridation was both benign and immensely beneficial to society – in fact, "the cornerstone of community oral disease prevention,’ as it was once termed in a surgeon general’s report (proving, if nothing else, that the federal bureaucracy can be as divided on issues as the country itself)

New light being shed on fluoridation foes' views

That’s not to say that the official line about how ‘necessary" it is to have fluoridated water has been by any means abandoned. To reverse course completely after all these years, after all, would be to call into question the entire credibility of the nation’s health establishment.

But one of the major "side effects" of this announcement has been, at long last, to accord new validity to the concerns of fluoridation’s opponents, such as the possibility that continual and excessive fluoride exposure can lead to conditions like skeletal fluorosis, make the elderly more prone to hip fractures, and cause neurological impairment by accumulating in brain tissue, as well as increasing absorption of aluminum and, in its most prevalent form, lead in children. Or in the view of Dr. Paul Connett, a chemistry professor and long-time fluoridation critic, dental fluorosis -- which some of the program's defenders have been quick to call a mere "cosmetic problem" --is "actually the first indication that fluoride has interfered with the enzymes in the body"

Health concerns along these lines, which have been reinforced by quite legitimate scientific research over the years, have prior to now been generally given short shrift by mainstream media fearful of appearing to accord recognition to people often dismissed as cranks and crackpots.

Such characterizations of fluoridation critics, in fact, go back decades to a time when the program was first starting to catch on throughout the nation after an initial "experimental" comparison of fluoridated and nonfluoridated communities was halted midway on the supposed premise that its effectiveness had already been proven beyond any doubt. It was subsequently attacked during the1950s and early ‘60s by the John Birch Society and other right-wing extremists as a plot to weaken America hatched in the Soviet Union – charges famously satirized in the 1964 black comedy, "Dr. Strangelove."

But while the ideological allegations may indeed have been ludicrous  fluoridation’s origins having involved both the U.S. aluminum industry, which produced substantial fluoride waste products, and an apparent attempt by the military to downplay the effects of fluoride following a disastrous spill in the process of producing large quantities for the first atomic bombs), the claims regarding its effects eventually proved to be anything but. Charges that it lowered IQs in children, for instance, were ultimately supported by joint studies carried out by Boston Children’s Hospital, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and Harvard Medical School and School of Public Health.

By then, however, the fix was in: To be anti-fluoridation was to risk ridicule and disfavor, as well as to have one’s funding cut off (as in the case of the funds needed to replicate that IQ study). Perhaps it is partly a sign of the times – times in which the public has far more access to information, and, indeed, when government secrets are being routinely revealed by outsiders – that so significant a chink has finally opened up in the official armor surrounding this program.

What's also noteworthy -- and encouraging -- about the recommendation that municipalities significantly reduce fluoridation levels is that it has been accompanied by warnings to parents not to give water with added fluoride to children under two (a practice that many have been led to believe would make for stronger teeth) and to have their kids use smaller amounts of fluoridated toothpaste --or, better yet, to give them nonfluoridated varieties.

And, as if to underscore just how important this development is to the future health of Americans -- and, hopefully, as a start down the long road back to a fluoride-free society -- news of the announcement was still hitting the airwaves on Monday morning, following a weekend in which all other news was eclipsed by the traumatic and tragic occurrence in Arizona.