AGM of the Safe Water Campaign today and one of the presentations was from Bernard Seward - here are his notes below but first the meeting kicked off with Rob Mehta singing "Brown Spotted Teeth" - now listed at the Centre for Political Song at Glasgow Caledonian University as a protest song - see our listing here. Also see next post re our other speaker Simon Charter on the qualities of water...Photo: Rob singing Brown Spotted Teeth
Fluoride and I Q Deficits
Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said he wants to make Britain the best-educated nation in the world.
If he’s serious he should talk to the Chinese. China is priding itself in turning out 20 thousand or more graduates, year on year and is leaving no stone unturned in pursuit of that goal.
One of those stones is the removal of an impediment to IQ among children aged 8 to 13. Research by Chinese scientists in 1995 found a correlation between high levels of naturally occurring fluorides in the ground water and incidents of serious brain dysfunction.
In that same year a Dr Phyllis J Mullenix who worked at the Department of Psychiatry at Boston Children’s Hospital, Massachussetts, published the results of her research into
the toxicological effects, upon the brain, of various substances used in therapeutic treatments, including sodium fluoride which has long had a use for the treatment of thyroid conditions.
Mullenix had used laboratory rats for her studies, but by scaling up the results in terms of equivalence of concentrations, body mass and blood/fluoride levels, she discovered, among other things, a reversal of a previously accepted mantra; notably that fluoride would not cross the blood/brain barrier in the unborn foetus. She found that it did; and that the outcoming behavioural patterns were related to gender, age and exposure of the subjects. Males were more sensitive to pre-natal fluorides, whereas females reacted more to weaning and adult exposures, but the net results overall represented a weakening of the expected mental faculties relating to intelligence.
A quote (or soundbite) from Dr Mullenix: "Humans are being exposed to levels of fluoride we know alters behaviour in rats; levels that flagged potential for motor dysfunction, IQ deficits, and/or learning disabilities in humans."
Concurrently with her work, though independently, a Dr Bruce Spittle of the Dunedin Medical School, New Zealand, corroborated Dr Mullenix with his own work spanning 60 years of study of the effects of fluorine compounds on the central nervous system.
In 1994, the same year as Spittle’s work was published, scientist Richard Masters and water engineer Aaron Coplan collaborated in a study of 280 thousand children, also in the state of Massachussetts, finding high lead levels in the blood of those living in artificially fluoridated communities. Lead is a heavy metal we’d rather do without. We’ve spent a fortune getting rid of it in car fuel because it compromises normal brain development leading to long term deficits in learning and social behaviour.
In terms of public health, lead-free petrol and all that it implied must surely be an excellent example of money well spent.
Ironically, for the fluoridation proponents who do not yet seem to have made the connection, a major survey of 120 thousand children living in fluoridated New York State found that those with high lead levels also had more tooth decay than children living in neighbouring, unfluoridated, communities or states. This was freely reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association and commented upon by the New York State Coalition on Fluoridation (NYSCOF) whose web site makes an impressive case for fluoride opposition.
So with the benefit of their own research and that of other countries, now freely available and accessible via the internet, the Chinese authorities are playing safe and have banned fluoridation, cancelling existing schemes and abandoning plans for any further interventions, all in interests of the pursuit of academic excellence among their young people; not to mention their ambitions of world dominance in the global economy.
The 1995 Chinese scientific research paper “Effect of Fluoride Exposure in Intelligence in Children” , described in Barry Groves’ book ‘Fluoride Drinking ourselves to Death’ carries a graph plotting levels of IQ against age in two districts: Xinhua which had a low concentration of fluoride; and Sima with a high concentration.
Using the incidence of dental fluorosis as the marker, the IQ scores were 5 to 19 points lower for children in the severe fluorosis area compared with those with minimal fluorosis. A second study found a difference of 6 to 12 points lower in those children afflicted with severe fluorosis.
Another global competitor is India. India has legislated to remove all fluoride compounds from water before it reaches the suppliers. It acknowledges fluorides (even those naturally occurring) to be inconsistent with academic achievement among its consumers. The condition of their teeth is an irrelevance.
So wake up Gordon Brown – and you too, Ed Balls! Don’t glibly accept all that stale US inherited 1950s Dental Association hype.
If waste management features in your manifesto, remember that the original fluoridation scheme was a nuclear waste fly-tipping exercise conducted secretly upon the American people under the cloak of ‘National Security’. In the immortal words of actor Michael Caine, ‘Not a lot of people know that’…including most at Westminster.
You could start by instructing chancellor Alistair Darling to withhold any further treasury funding for ill-considered or fraudulently manipulated dental health schemes.
If British education is really worth fighting for, and it most certainly is, it should be simple enough to follow the 21st century prevailing policy of the American Dental Association; tell the truth about fluoridation, refuse to compromise further your declared educational objectives while setting aside the collection of disparate professional views, based on vested interests and reputations.
Bernard J Seward B.Ed(Hons)
