T-Shirt Campaign Update
More than 65 shirts have been sold in the first two weeks, and with your help we should reach our goal of 100 before the shirts become unavailable on August 15th. Get your limited edition “Our Water, Our Health, Our Choice” shirt before they’re gone! — CLICK HERE
New Zealand Needs Our Help
The dental, chemical, and sugar lobbies in North America, Australia, and Europe are watching the debate going on in New Zealand over a national fluoridation mandate. Depending on the outcome, it could either pave the way for mandates in other countries, or it could be another crushing defeat against fluoridation that would help prevent the introduction and passage of similar proposals in other communities, and could possibly help overturn mandates in Ireland and Israel. In other words, what happens in New Zealand will impact all of us, which is why we need to join together to fight this mandate.
Local campaigners, led by Fluoride Free New Zealand, are working tirelessly to defeat this devastating proposal. They are holding meetings, organizing letter and phone campaigns, building a grassroots effort, initiating an ad campaign, collecting petition signatures (sign the petition), and lobbying elected officials. They are currently airing two commercials on television, but need financial support to continue this effort:
- Watch Commercial #1 – “Hazardous Waste”
- Watch Commercial #2 – “The World vs. Fluoridation”
- DONATE TO AD CAMPAIGN
In an effort to help the worldwide campaign beyond NZ, the TV producer behind these ads will also be modifying them for campaigners in Australia, and has offered to do the same for other campaigns at a minimal cost. If you or your campaign are interested, please contact: info@fluoridefree.org.nz
Fluoride Free New Zealand has also put together a comprehensive campaign book containing a collection of useful articles, facts, and research on fluoridation that would be a fine addition to any campaigner’s tool kit. It can be purchased for $15 through FAN by emailing ellen@fluoridealert.org with your request.
Senior advisor to the Fluoride Action Network, Paul Connett, PhD, recently travelled to New Zealand to present the case against fluoridation to the public in a series of speaking events. The NZ campaigners captured one of these presentations in full for your viewing pleasure, and also made a seperate 2-minute long video using excerpts from a presentation explaining where fluoridation chemicals come from. Paul was also featured in a powerful 8-minute interview that aired on Mainland TV that I urge you to watch and share.
While in NZ, Paul noticed that an inaccurate and misleading 2014 review was still repeatedly being used by officials to support their fluoridation efforts. Below is Paul’s explaination of how NZ officials are using junk science and fraudulent conclusions to influence both government officials and residents:
NZ Scientists Use Inaccurate Review to Promote Fluoridation
For over 70 years the promotion of fluoridation has been based on “authority” rather than sound science. Thus it came as no surprise when the NZ Ministry of Health in their current attempt to introduce mandatory fluoridation by stealth, called on some prestigious scientists and researchers to produce a blue ribbon panel report to support the claims that the practice is safe. Heading up this panel were none other than the Prime minister’s chief scientific adviser Sir Peter Gluckman along with Sir David Skegg, president of the Royal Society of New Zealand. The panel faithfully obliged and their report was released on August 22, 2014 and entitled: Health Effects of Water Fluoridation: a Review of the Scientific Evidence. Gluckman and Skegg signed off on the review’s content and their overall conclusion (surprise, surprise) was that fluoridation is “safe.”
However, the report is full of mistakes, omissions, misrepresentations and selective use of the literature. One of the biggest mistakes came in their cavalier dismissal of the Harvard meta-analysis of 27 IQ studies (Choi et al., 2012). Gluckman and Skegg repeat a major mistake made by many promoters of fluoridation. They incorrectly stated that the average lowering of IQ in 26 of the 27 studies was a downward shift of “less than 1 IQ point.” However this mistake was corrected by Choi et al over 2 year’s ago. It was not a drop of half an IQ point but a drop of half of one standard deviation, which is the equivalent of 7 IQ points. That is a very big difference!
The Gluckman and Skegg team “corrected” this mistake in an updated version of their report. But they corrected their mistake in a way that would not be clear to the layperson but worse still made this change without changing the conclusion derived from the mistake. This conclusion – for anyone knowledgeable on the subject – is ridiculous, but unfortunately many will be deceived by this manipulation and conclude there is no problem with fluoride’s neurotoxicity – and specifically its ability to lower IQ in children.
Thus I urge you to compare below the original and corrected version of their text. I have put in bold the words changed and the derived conclusion in italics -this conclusion is not changed between the two versions.
ORIGINAL VERSION: “Recently there have been a number of reports from China and other areas …that have claimed an association between high water fluoride levels and minimally reduced intelligence (measured as IQ) in children…the claimed shift of less than one IQ point suggests that this is likely to be a measurement or statistical artifact of no functional significance”
CORRECTED VERSION: “Recently there have been a number of reports from China and other areas …that have claimed an association between high water fluoride levels and minimally reduced intelligence (measured as IQ) in children…the claimed shift of less than one standard deviation suggests that this is likely to be a measurement or statistical artifact of no functional significance.”
If this correction had been stated more clearly, as it should have been, it would have appeared as:
“Recently there have been a number of reports from China and other areas …that have claimed an association between high water fluoride levels and minimally (should have been omitted, PC) reduced intelligence (measured as IQ) in children…the claimed shift of 7 IQ points suggests that this is likely to be a measurement or statistical artifact of no functional significance.”
Communicated this way it would have been obvious that the conclusion was sheer nonsense, since a shift downwards of 7 IQ points -were it to occur – would more than halve the number of geniuses in the NZ population and more than double the number of mentally handicapped. That would have huge economic and social implications for NZ but according to Gluckman and Skegg and their “corrected” version stands, “it would have no functional significance”!
So we are left with a very uncomfortable question, did Gluckman and Skegg and their advisers simply make a clumsy mistake, or was this a deliberate attempt to deceive the public?
In addition to the specific deception above, their overview of neurotoxicity was highly selective and self-serving. Other than the Harvard meta-analysis they ignored the over 300 animal and human studies that also lend weight to fluoride’s neurotoxicity, but selected one study that failed to find a difference in IQ between a fluoridated and non-fluoridated community – Broadbent et al., 2014. How selective is that? Moreover, they failed to note that this study has been critiqued for its lack of power to detect a difference (see the Feb 2016 letter by Osmunson, Limeback and Neurath that was published in the same journal where the Broadbent article was published). There were virtually no controls. There were over 900 children in the fluoridated community but less than 90 in the non-fluoridated and about half of these were exposed to fluoride via supplements.
Despite the many mistakes and misrepresentations it contains, this review is still being heavily used to engineer mandatory fluoridation in NZ. Gluckman and Skegg and their co-authors have let down the public, who have the right to expect far better from such “prestigious” scientists and the bodies they represent.
-Paul Connett, PhD,
Co-author of The Case Against Fluoride (Chelsea Green, 2010) and senior adviser to the Fluoride Action Network
Latest Fluoride News
–Healdsburg Fluoride Providers Can’t Verify Product Safety (California)
–Fluoridation Foe Against Port Angeles Advisory Vote (Washington)
–Nelson Health Board Member Exposes Fluoridation Set-up (New Zealand)
–FDA to Require Pharma to Update Fluoroquinolone Labels (U.S.)
–Harrisonburg Fluoride Leak Causes Council to Reconsider Practice (Virginia)
–Japan: FDA Approves Sales of Fluoridated Salt (Japan)
–Pete Evans’ Wife Recommends Fluoride-free Toothpaste (New Zealand)
For more fluoride related media, please visit FAN’s News Archive.
Sincerely,
Stuart Cooper
Campaign Director
Fluoride Action Network
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