Fluoride-Gate, naming names at Centers for Disease Control

[Celebration]

http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/011508/opi_20080115024.shtml

Americans' distrust of societal institutions continues to grow, and now comes evidence of yet another burgeoning scandal: Fluoride-Gate. A torrent of recent bad news about the safety of fluorides has brought key names to the surface from the murky alphabet soup of players in the fluoride game at EPA, CDC, FDA, NIDCR, USDA, ADA, and AMA. The inevitable questions have begun about who knew what, when, and why was certain information kept quiet.

The first ominous drumbeats started in 2006, when a National Research Council committee recommended that the Environmental Protection Agency lower the allowable amount of fluoride in drinking water - to an unspecified level. As if that wasn't unnerving enough, the committee specifically stated that kidney patients, diabetics, seniors, infants, and outdoor workers were susceptible populations especially vulnerable to harm from fluoride ingestion.

Centers for Disease Control officials strove mightily to dismiss NRC's report as irrelevant, but in August of 2007 CDC's ethics committees received a formal ethics complaint about CDC's activities in promoting fluoridation. The complaint circled the globe via the Internet. A Kentucky attorney began assembling a list of "potentially responsible parties." After having been contacted by angry kidney patients, in September he formally notified the National Kidney Foundation that the organization may be held liable for failure to warn its constituents that kidney patients are particularly susceptible to harm from fluorides. The issue was immediately put on the agenda of the next meeting of the foundation's national board and the foundation's former position statement about fluoridated water has been retracted and the issue is now undergoing review.

The ethics complaint became a hot potato. How would CDC explain why its own data showed blacks to be disproportionately harmed by moderate and severe "dental fluorosis" teeth damage, yet CDC had not felt it necessary to openly show photos of the conditions to the black community? What would be the response of CDC's Chief of Public Health Practice, Dr. Stephanie Bailey, an African American woman who witnessed the presentation of the complaint? The complaint embarrassingly documented that Bailey had acknowledged earlier that a CDC-funded and nationally distributed public health ethics policy was not being implemented internally by CDC.

There is a Scientific American article about fluoride this month.

http://thyroid.about.com/b/2008/01/02/experts-are-having-second-thoughts-about-fluoride.htm

It used to be that opposition to fluoride -- especially fluoridating water supplies -- was considered akin to walking around wearing a tin-foil hat. But concerns about fluoride have gained increasing validity in recent years. And never more so than with the publication this month of an article in Scientific American. The article, titled Second Thoughts on Fluoride, looks at the fluoride controversy, and the fact that the attitudes about fluoridation among scientists are starting to shift. Mainstream scientists and experts are becoming increasingly vocal about the risks of too much fluoride.
Scientific American's editors write: "Some recent studies suggest that over-consumption of fluoride can raise the risks of disorders affecting teeth, bones, the brain and the thyroid gland."

The article's author, Dan Fagin, is an award-wining environmental reporter and Director of New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. He writes: "There is no universally accepted optimal level for daily intake of fluoride." And according to Fagin, some of the researchers he talked to even wonder whether the 1 mg/L that is added into drinking water is too much.

Another take, from the author of the Scientific American article

http://www.watertechonline.com/news.asp?N_ID=68907

Fagin observes of the work of Levy and others: “It is a maddeningly complex area of research because diets, toothbrushing habits and water fluoridation levels vary so much and also because genetic, environmental and even cultural factors appear to leave some people much more susceptible to the effects of fluoride — both positive and negative — than others.”

The article reviews the history of fluoridation, starting with Colorado dentist Frederick McKay’s pioneering research in the 1930s, through the promotion of fluoridated toothpastes in the 1950s, and down to the present day, including the 2006 findings of a committee of the National Research Council (NRC), which, as Fagin notes, “gave a tinge of legitimacy to some longtime assertions made by antifluoridation campaigners.” The NRC committee urged that the US Environmental Protection Agency reduce its current maximum limit for fluoride in drinking water, which is 4 parts per million (ppm).

Fagin also explains the chemistry of how fluoridation fights tooth decay and/or harms bone and teeth, and reports on fluoride levels in some foods and beverages. The Iowa study found, for instance, that brewed black tea contains 3.73 ppm of fluoride and apple-flavored juice drink contains 1.09 ppm.

The current recommended fluoride concentration for public tap water is a range of 0.7 to 1.2 ppm.

[philb]

1. Scientists at EPA who regulate fluoride actually held a strike at EPA building to protest

the Gov'ts policy of failing to eliminate fluoride from water supplies. The fluoride used in town water supplies is toxic waste from Florida phosphate mines, which has high levels of toxic metals like lead, arsenic, etc. It represented the biggest toxic waste problem in Florida by a lot, but they were smart and through lobbying the right people(like ADA) and spreading a litte money around, they bamboozled cities all over the country to take their toxic waste off their hands and put it in the water supplies.

Other countries weren't so easily fooled though a few places were.
Fluoride is very toxic and similar to lead in toxicity. Fluoride as used is documented to cause a lot of adverse health effects, which is why EPA and NAS have been trying to educate the public about this issue.
Fluoride also has synergistic effects with metals like mercury and lead, which most have exposures to, and the synergistic effects of the fluorida with the toxic metals is much higher.

[cosmik debris]

4. Count on Dr. philb to save us from the evul fluoride!

[trotsky]

2. LOL

They've definitely lowered the standard for what constitutes a "-gate" scandal, eh?

There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that fluoridation of municipal water has led to vastly improved oral health for millions.

But of COURSE excessive doses of fluoride can be harmful. I don't envy the EPA's position one bit - it's obviously impossible to pick a number to mandate, since individuals' diets and local water supply vary so greatly.

So is this the long-awaited PROOF that it REALLY WAS a Commie plot to destroy America??? :rofl:

[Orrex]

3. Purity of Essence!