To the editor:

In a recent letter headlined “Don’t fall for a new fluoride hysteria” (the Times, Monday, June 26), there are some statements I considered to be odd.

Twice, the author refers to fluoride as added to the water in China, and how poorly regulated their fluoride additive is. However, in China they don’t add fluoride to the water. They take it out.

He describes how toxic are products from China, how poor their health safety standards. Yet the fluoride added to Cape Ann water now comes from China. As he states, we are not located in the People’s Republic of China. Nevertheless, China has now managed to locate itself in us through our water supplies.

The author claims that cavity reduction in non-fluoridated communities is the result of food produced with water from fluoridated communities. This fails to explain how the non-fluoridated world, the majority, continues to decline in cavities by consuming food produced from non-fluoridated sources. That’s quite a mystery.

The author gives a link to a recent New Zealand study which supposedly disproves 37 previous studies that show a lowered IQ in high fluoride areas as compared to low fluoride areas. One study can’t disprove 37 others, even if it were good science — which it was not. The New Zealand study consisted of 99 non-fluoridated and 891 fluoridated subjects, a vastly unequal number. The study also reports that 139 subjects were taking fluoride supplements, but does not identify which subjects! This study, undertaken by a dentist and not a scientist, is seriously flawed.

As far as fluoridation as a communist plot, it’s more like a capitalist plot, since corporate polluters profit by using our water supplies to dispose of their toxic waste, instead of having to pay for disposing of it properly.

The author wanted to know why the alphabet combinations of bureaucracy don’t sound the alarm on fluoridation. That’s a fair question. The short answer is they have done it for so long, unsubstantiated by science, that they don’t dare stop. They’re riding a tiger and don’t know how to get off.

But more than that, there’s a financial incentive to stay on that tiger. The prestigious institutions that endorse fluoridation are heavily dependent upon fluoride producers and fluoride polluters for part of their funding.

Let’s follow the money trail in another letter.

In “Ignore scare tactics on fluoride” (the Times, Monday, June 30) — written by someone who initiated fluoridation in Manchester — he cites anecdotal remarks by local dentists on cavity rates as though it were science, which it is not.

When fluoridation is ended in communities, or never even started, cavity rates continue to drop.

This data is based on scientific methodology, not anecdotes.

BARBARA GOLL

Rockport