As a board member for the American Environmental Health Studies Project (Fluoride Action Network), I want to thank each person for their support these last few years.  The new year will be another very important step in ending fluoridation.  With your support, new research will be published, local communities supported, responses to legislators and decision makers along with continued legal action to make water safer.  Your continued support is critical in stopping fluoridation in each water system, community, state, nation wide and world wide.  More than half of everyone fluoridated is in the USA.  If we can stop it here, few will continue. 

Consider the NTP report, the lawsuit, and recent studies like Till (2020) “0.5 mg increase in fluoride intake from infant formula corresponded to an 8.8-point decrement in Performance IQ” and a “4.4 FSIQ (Full Scale IQ) points among preschool children who were formula-fed in the first six months of life for each 0.5 mg/L increase in water fluoride concentration.”  0.5 mg of fluoride is often added to water and with your support, will be stopped.  400 million people fluoridated at about $500 for each IQ loss is over $800 billion brain damage each year.  However, lower IQ puts a burden on schools, work productivity, increased crime, domestic abuse, frustration and heartache.  The brain is a terrible thing to damage and we can, should and will stop the harm. Thank you for your continued support.  

Bill Osmunson DDS MPH

I’ve been a volunteer activist opposing fluoridation for over a decade on the local, state, national and international levels. Before I retired, I was in management positions with the American Cancer Society and Physicians for Social Responsibility, where I worked with many high-level medical and scientific professionals. I can say this unequivocally – the staff and volunteer scientists, physicians and dentists I work with at FAN are the equal of any of them in expertise, professionalism and integrity. But even more than that, they have the courage to challenge the medical and dental establishments that continue to misuse their authority positions to cling to the status quo instead of acknowledging the massive scientific data showing fluoridation is a major risk to human health. FAN is the leading organization in the country in this great cause and I’m proud to be working with them.

Rick North

As a longterm Board member for the national fluoride research and legal efforts of the American Environmental Health Studies Project (Fluoride Action Network), I appreciate every person for supporting this important work over the past few years. 

This year promises to be a time of critical steps toward ending water fluoridation in the U.S. 

Serious progress has been achieved on both the research and legal fronts to reveal the exceptionally harmful neurotoxic effects of fluoridation to infants among its diverse harms to human health. 

I have personally visited the water fluoridation equipment inside major city water purification plants and observed how tiny leaks of the fluoridation chemicals damaged concrete pads so severely that its acidic corrosive evidence appeared as eight to ten inch deep holes left in solid concrete. 

Fluoridation chemicals are well documented to be so strongly acidic that they attack and corrode metals in the municipal water systems and inside of home plumbing systems so as to leach toxic metals such as lead into the water. 

Fluoride is known to have the highest electronegativity in the Periodic Table of Elements and is not the kind of chemical to be added to the nation’s drinking water.

We look forward to the National Toxicology Program’s (NTP) fluoride report being released to the public and for use in our legal efforts to ban adding it to the drinking water.

Neil J. Carman, PhD

Having begun my involvement in studying fluoride’s toxicity in 1985 while serving as a Senior Scientist at Headquarters of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, I am still at it at 86 years of age. I and other EPA scientists were turned on to the dangers of putting fluoride into drinking water during a seminar by Dr. John Yiamouyiannis, and we started to do something about that. We became acquainted with and developed close friendship with others who felt as we did. Dr. Robert Carton, along with seven other EPA professional employees including me, organized a labor union to represent EPA scientists, engineers, toxicologists and other professionals  at EPA Headquarters. That union, Local 2050 of the  National Federation of Federal Employees, filed an amicus curiae brief supporting a lawsuit against EPA filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council that aimed to have a science-based drinking water standard for fluoride that could prevent adverse health effects. The lawsuit failed, and Dr. Carton and I, using personal leave time, traveled to many cities to help fight off efforts to fluoridate water supplies, and we supported those efforts in other ways as well.

Ten years passed, and the union asked to support a citizens petition in California to defeat a measure that would have mandated state-wide fluoridation. So in 1997 we held a union meeting to vote on that request, and we asked Professor Paul Connett, who had recently taken up the fight, and Dr. Carton, who by that time had left EPA to become Chief Environmental Officer at the U.S. Army Medical Research Laboratory, to address union members about recent developments in the fight. Union members voted unanimously to support the California Citizens for Safe Drinking Water ballot initiative.

Shortly thereafter Dr. Paul and Ellen Connett created the Fluoride Action Network, and I immediately joined. Paul and I, sometimes with Dr. Carton and other fluoride fighters, traveled across the country addressing forums, city councils, state legislatures and medical meetings about the ever building scientific evidence of fluoride’s dangers. Drs. Hardy Limeback, Kathleen Thiessen, Phyllis Mullenix, Robert Isaacson were among the many Western scientists publishing in English damning evidence against ingestion of fluoride. Meanwhile in Asia and the Middle East others were doing the same, focussing on brain damage. FAN arranged to have English translations made of these studies. By the early 21st Century overwhelming evidence of developmental neurotoxicity had accumulated. In 2016 a review of that evidence led Drs. Connett, David Kennedy, Bruce Spittle, Quanyong  Xiang and I published in the journal Fluoride what might be a “safe’ dose of fluoride for infants and pregnant women, namely less than 0.05 milligrams (mg) per day. As data in the National Academies of Science report, “Fluoride in Drinking Water” show, our “safe” dose means fluoride should be banned as an additive in water supplies. Our paper predicted that a child exposed to 2.0 mg per day, when compared with a child exposed to 0.5 mg per day, would be at an IQ disadvantage of about 5 points, all other factors affecting IQ being equal. Subsequent publications have agreed with our estimate of a “safe” dose, and epidemiology data show our predicted negative effect magnitude is just about right. 

Summing up, I‘ve been at this fight or 38 years, and I could not have kept it up without FAN. 

FAN’s work in supporting citizens fighting to keep this brain damaging element out of their drinking water, in getting the Chinese language scientific literature translated into English, in publishing to government bodies and scientific forums evidence of fluoride’s manifold manifestations of adverse health effects – from brain damage to cancer and endocrine effects, etc., etc. – has been a public service beyond price. I am proud to have been a part of all this, and urge everyone who values their own – and the public’s – well being to dig deep and keep FAN alive and functioning as only it can.

Bill Hirzy, PhD

Being on the Board of Directors for the American Environmental Health Studies Project (AEHSP) fits well into my interest in public health. While working as a public health nurse in the 1980s, I developed an interest in water fluoridation. I was always perplexed that fluoride could be put into the public-water supply with little consideration given to the dose a person might receive. This, of course, is a popular reason to oppose fluoridation.

I met Paul Connett around this time due to our shared interest in opposing a waste incinerator in a city near my town. As time went on and our professional and personal bonds strengthened, he and his wife, Ellen, asked me to be on the AEHSP Board of Directors. I am glad I said yes.

With its focus on scientific research and grassroots organizing, AEHSP provides a serious and professional avenue to challenge water fluoridation. I am grateful for AEHSP’s dedicated staff and for my colleagues on the Board of Directors and on the Advisory Committee for the Fluoride Action Network. I am also grateful for all the people across this country who share the belief that water fluoridation needs to stop. Thank you.

Scientific evidence concerning fluoride’s risk to the developing brain is a call to action for all of us. We must push hard to counteract this public health threat. In an excellent video concerning fluoride’s neurotoxicity, researcher Dr. Christine Till stated that “failure to act could amount to enormous costs at the population level” (22:41). AEHSP is here to work with the many people around the world who understand the unacceptable and unnecessary risk associated with water fluoridation. Let’s continue our important work to end this practice. There are ways to promote oral health without jeopardizing public safety.

Katie Lajoie, BSN, BA, RN