Anti-fluoride campaigner Dr Paul Connett, who gave a speech to the Kapiti Coast District Council regulatory management committee on Thursday, says there were now 24 published studies that indicated moderate to high exposure to fluoride is associated with lowered IQ; there were more than 100 animal experiments which showed fluoride can damage the brain; three studies that indicated fluoride damages the foetal brain and two behavioral studies which indicated a change in behaviour.

He said what troubled him most was the lack of health studies being done by health authorities about risks of fluoride in water.

“If you look at the fluoridated countries, and there’s only eight that have more than 50 per cent of their population drinking fluoridated water, New Zealand among them, there’s practically no health health studies being done… It’s simply not being examined.”

He said of all the fluoridated countries, only New Zealand had attempted to investigate but a study in the 1980s “didn’t find any relationship with a lowered IQ with people living in a fluoridated community”.

The policy of recommending fluoride in water had become “so sacred, so important” to health authorities, he said.

“It’s now looking to me as if it’s more important to protect the practice than it’s to protect the people. That’s the most rational interpretation for a lot of irrational things that are going on today. It’s sad and I hope New Zealand has a way of bucking the tide.”

His message to the Ministry of Health was: “Let’s have science respond to science.”

And Dr Connett said low levels of fluoride in mother’s milk were about .004 parts per million but levels in bottle-fed babies in a fluoridated community of one part per million were up to 250 times the level of what a breast-fed baby received.

“In the millions of years of evolution, nature determined that the newborn baby didn’t need very much fluoride.

“We know better than nature apparently.”

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