Everyone agrees that life is better with teeth. But there is much evidence that fluoride in drinking water may harm teeth and bones and may not reduce tooth decay at all.
Writing in the August Gazette, Sonoma County’s Public Health Officer, Lynn Silver Chalfin, M.D., mentioned the Iowa Fluoride Study. But instead of telling us about the study results—the study showed no reduction in tooth decay for 11-year-old children drinking fluoridated water for their whole lives, as compared to those drinking fluoride-free water—she wrote to the study author, John Warren, to get his endorsement of fluoridation. Warren gets his grant money from an agency that’s been promoting fluoridation for 63 years. If he said “Fluoridation should be stopped,” most likely his paycheck would be stopped. For sixty years, scientists speaking and writing about the dangers of fluoridation have lost grant money and jobs. More information about this corruption of science can be found here: www.slweb.org/hileman4.html
Chalfin, a medical doctor being paid with taxpayer dollars, should know the difference between science and promotion—between study results and personal endorsements. We are not paying her to do PR for fluoride. We’re paying her to guard our health! That includes all 500,000 of us, including the 1% likely to become ill from fluoride, as well as kidney patients, diabetics, frail seniors, and babies—who should get NO fluoride.
Chalfin wrote in the August Gazette, and stated in several meetings, that fluoride is a necessary nutrient, like Vitamin A or sodium chloride. This is not true. Fluoride is a toxin used in pesticides, nerve gas, and rat poisons. There has never been a study that showed fluoride is an essential nutrient, though some scientists attempted to prove that and failed. The issue should have been settled in 1998, when 15 top scientists wrote a letter to Bruce Alberts, then president of the National Academy of Sciences. Alberts’s reply included this: “Nowhere in the report is it stated that fluoride is an essential nutrient. If any speaker or panel member . . . referred to fluoride as such, they misspoke.” We need to hear Dr. Chalfin say: “I misspoke.” The whole Alberts correspondence can be found here: www.fluoridation.com/fraud.htm
Dr. Chalfin wrote in the Gazette that the fluoride used in water fluoridation comes from “crushed rock.” This is not true. The product used in 90% of the USA for fluoridation, and proposed for use in Sonoma County, according to the recent Engineering Report, is hydroflurosilicic acid, a hazardous waste scrubbed from the smokestacks of phosphate fertilizer plants and dumped unchanged into public water systems. It contains arsenic and lead as well as fluoride, and has never been approved by any public agency for human ingestion. By disposing of their hazardous waste in this manner, the fertilizer companies avoid the high costs of proper hazardous waste disposal. However, the lead levels in the blood of children drinking fluoridated water are higher than those of children drinking fluoride-free water. This would not be acceptable even if fluoride did reduce tooth decay.
Under the Gazette subhead “Mythbusting” Dr. Chalfin claimed people get erroneous information from the Internet. Does she think we have no capacity for critical thinking? I have learned much from Internet sites, but I have also read 7 books on fluoride this year, 2 by a medical doctor and 4 by Ph.D.s. The best one, Fluoridation: The Great Dilemma. by George Waldbott, M.D., a doctor who treated some 500 patients suffering from fluoride-caused illness after their public water supplies were fluoridated, is available for free download here: www.whale.to/b/Waldbott_DILEMMA_ocr.pdf . To Dr. Chalfin, I particularly recommend chapter 9 (p. 110) “Illness from Artifically Fluoridated Water,” and Chapter 11 (p. 148), “Fluoride and the Soft Tissues.” Waldbott found that, in some people, 1 ppm of fluoride in water causes gastritis, arthritis, retinitis, kidney dysfunction, mental confusion, and many other adverse conditions. This is not surprising, since fluoride depresses thyroid function and disrupts as many as 100 enzymes.
Dr. Chalfin’s Gazette article quoted a fluoride endorsement by John Doull, Chairman of the National Research Council committee that published a report on fluoride toxicology in 2006. But Chalfin didn’t mention that Doull also said this: “We have much less information than we should, considering how long this [fluoridation] has been going on. . . . the thyroid changes do worry me.” The NRC report called for more research in many areas, but seven years later, the research hasn’t happened.
Moreover, the lead levels in the blood of children drinking fluoridated water are higher than those of children drinking fluoride-free water. This would not be acceptable even if fluoride did reduce tooth decay.
Dr. John Colquhoun, D.D.S., Ph.D., was the Principal Dental Officer of Auckland, New Zealand, and for many years was an avid fluoride promoter. In 1980, on a world tour to study fluoridation, he learned that tooth decay was dropping just as fast in unfluoridated countries and communities as it was in fluoridated ones. Back home, he studied tens of thousands of children’s dental records, comparing fluoridated with unfluoridated areas, and found that fluoride does not reduce tooth decay. He went public with his findings, and was fired. His article “Why I Changed my Mind about Fluoridation” can be found here: http://www.slweb.org/colquhoun.html, and an excellent interview with him can be found here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8th-Bbb0LQ
Another prominent dentist, Hardy Limeback of Toronto, also changed his position after reviewing the science, and apologized to those he had harmed when he was promoting fluoridation. A Google search will find his blog.
In August 2013, the Supreme Court of Israel outlawed fluoridation for Israel, citing health concerns. Many cities have also stopped or rejected fluoridation in the last few years. If our current “Public Health Officer” won’t tell the truth about fluoride and serve the public health, instead of the special interests promoting this outdated and dangerous practice, maybe we need to find one who will.
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