Every day, tens of millions of Americans will be medicated without their consent. The medication will be administered in unrestricted amounts, even to those who are at the greatest risk of succumbing to its toxic side effects. This medicine is called fluoride. Fluoride is a naturally occurring element which is today artificially added to the drinking water of over 72% of American homes. This practice is nothing new. Water fluoridation was originally developed by the Nazis.
Nazi scientists added sodium fluoride into the drinking water of concentration camp prisoners in order to study its toxic side effects. One may ask why this horrifying practice was then adopted by the United States in 1950 and is today declared to be one of the "ten great public health achievements of the twentieth century" by the Center for Disease Control (CDC). Many assume it was to prevent cavities. The facts, however, suggest a less wholesome truth.
Dr. Paul Connett is a professor of chemistry at St. Lawrence University and has been researching water fluoridation for over 14 years. He is an anti-fluoridation activist who released his newest book, titled The Case Against Fluoride, in October 2010. Dr. Connett is at the forefront of a growing movement of medical professionals who are attempting to end water fluoridation in this country. "We have a statement," Connett claims, "signed by over 3,160 medical professionals, including doctors, dentists, and chiropractors, which calls for an end to fluoridation." Connett calls water fluoridation a "terrible mistake" and claims that today there is no difference in rates of tooth decay between fluoridated and non-fluoridated states. He says, "Studies show that fluoride, if it works at all, works topically." Connett also believes that water fluoridation puts certain groups at great risk, and points out that when babies consume formulas made with fluoridated water they receive 250 times more fluoride than is naturally present in breast milk.
In his book, Connett suggests that the decision to fluoridate arose from collusion between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Fluorine Lawyers Committee, a legal group which was funded by the oil, steel, and phosphate fertilizer industries. These three industries all had one thing in common: they all used fluoride in the production of their goods and they all produced toxic, fluoride-laden waste. Fluoride was also one of the primary byproducts of nuclear power research at the time. It seems that this may have been another factor leading to the implementation of the water fluoridation program. It should be noted that the chief toxicologist of the Manhattan project, Dr. Harold Hodge, was chairman of the committee which promoted the launch of fluoridation in America's second test city, Newburg, New York.
Fluoride Action Network
The fluoridation program proved to be a great success for these aforementioned industries. Before the advent of this program, these industries had to pay hefty fees to dispose of their waste products. Even to this day, it is illegal, according to international law, to dump fluoride into the ocean. These industries could now sell their hazardous waste for profit to the U.S. government. Connett estimates that the phosphate fertilizer industry alone stands to save $200 million per year through these sales. With our government's consent, these industries have since been channeling a byproduct, which is too toxic to put in the ocean, into the water which is consumed by millions of Americans.
But what does toxic waste have to do with cavities? Well, the link between fluoride and oral health was first hypothesized by H. Trembly Dean in 1942. Dean conducted a somewhat questionable study, which compared the amount of naturally occurring fluoride in drinking water in twenty-one different cities with incidences of tooth decay. His study claims to have found that tooth decay was less prominent in regions which had at least one part per million of fluoride in their drinking water. His study also indicated, however, that children in regions of high fluoridation were prone to develop dental fluorosis, a biological disorder marked by eroded and blotchy tooth enamel. Dean suggested that artificial fluoridation would cause 10% of affected children to develop dental fluorosis. Even with the understanding that a large amount of children would be permanently injured, government organizations still decided to move forward with the fluoridation program.
Today it is obvious that the decision to fluoridate American homes was made without adequate research. According to the CDC, 32% of children in this country now have dental fluorosis, a number which has been steadily climbing in recent history. While dental fluorosis is often disregarded as an insignificant cosmetic disorder, it actually suggests that internal systems have been profoundly impacted. "They made a gamble," says Connett, "the gamble was that you could do that to the external tooth without doing that to the internal bone and without damaging other tissue in the child's body." Connett claims that there has been little to no effort by government organizations, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC, to research fluoride and its connection to health issues. Furthermore, there has been virtually no new research indicating that water fluoridation can even prevent tooth decay. In fact, the current Public Health Service review of fluoride available on the CDC's website still uses Trembly Dean's 1942 study as the only scientific support for the effectiveness of water fluoridation.
With minimal scientific support, government health organizations continue to stubbornly promote water fluoridation. In 1995, the California State Legislature passed a bill which mandates that all communities with populations over 10,000 become fluoridated. However, there are still many counties, including Santa Barbara, which have yet to begin fluoridating water. This is because the 1995 bill did not set an official start date to the statewide fluoridation programs. Furthermore, in 1999, the City Council of Santa Barbara rejected the states fluoridation program by a five to two margin. City Attorney, Dan Wallace, believes that this ruling by the City Council will hold if challenged by the state.
It seems that Santa Barbara County is temporarily safe from water fluoridation. This suspicion is confirmed by Dale Armstrong, lead chemist for the Goleta Water District. Dale claims that Santa Barbara is free from artificial fluoridation and that the most recent lab results indicate that there is a presence of fluoride at 0.4 ppm in our drinking water, an amount which falls drastically below California's maximum fluoride allowance of 2ppm. Armstrong claims that, "there are a lot of pros and cons for fluoridation" and warns that "anything at a high enough concentration can be very dangerous and fluoride is no different."
Unfortunately, Santa Barbara's future is anything but certain. In 1999, the board of directors in San Diego's Helix Water District unanimously voted to resist mandatory fluoridation. While San Diego has managed to resist for fluoridation for over a decade, it seems that they will finally lose the battle. San Diego is currently number one on the state's fluoridation priority list and Dr. Connett solemnly hypothesizes that San Diego may begin fluoridating this year. Santa Barbara is number 9 on the priority list and will inevitably fall into the state's crosshairs at some point in the future. It will be the responsibility of all Santa Barbara County's residents to stand up and resist the state's dangerous and irrational program of mass medication.
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art by David Dees, dessillustration.com
This article originally appeared in the current edition of the University of California at Santa Barbara student magazine Word, edited by Hector Diaz. "Ben Loman" is [was] a student at UCSB. Photos by Yuina Nunokawa, excepting that of the author.
American Tap Water: A Toxic History:
"With the recent uproar over the amount of pharmaceuticals in America’s drinking water, the general public is paying more attention to the toxins lurking in their tap water."
Dr. Paul Connett's book The Case Against Fluoride is available on Amazon.com.
fluoridealert.org
"As noted by Dr. Hardy Limeback, Head of Preventive Dentistry at the University of Toronto, 'it is illogical to assume that tooth enamel is the only tissue affected by low daily doses of fluoride ingestion.'"
Culture Change mailing address: P.O. Box 3387, Santa Cruz, California, 95063, USA, Telephone 1-215-243-3144 (and fax). Culture Change was founded by Sustainable Energy Institute (formerly Fossil Fuels Policy Action), a nonprofit organization.
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Every day, tens of millions of Americans will be medicated without their consent. The medication will be administered in unrestricted amounts, even to those who are at the greatest risk of succumbing to its toxic side effects. This medicine is called fluoride. Fluoride is a naturally occurring element which is today artificially added to the drinking water of over 72% of American homes. This practice is nothing new. Water fluoridation was originally developed by the Nazis.
Nazi scientists added sodium fluoride into the drinking water of concentration camp prisoners in order to study its toxic side effects. One may ask why this horrifying practice was then adopted by the United States in 1950 and is today declared to be one of the "ten great public health achievements of the twentieth century" by the Center for Disease Control (CDC). Many assume it was to prevent cavities. The facts, however, suggest a less wholesome truth.
