Normally, I criticize libertarianism, but there's a broad overlap between many crank movements and libertarianism. Anti-fluoridation movements are grotesquely crank, and have a widespread libertarian following because public health policy is a government (not market) activity.
About.com's Guide to Chemistry, Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D., unfortunately includes her opinion of fluoridation in the chemistry topic.
Why I Oppose Fluoridation of Public Drinking Water lists a standard set of pseudoscientific arguments, and links to a bunch more About.com articles by herself and Mary Shomon, the About.com Guide to Thyroid Disease.
A really clear howler is this statement: "Fluoride that we put in water today will still be in water tomorrow. Fluoride doesn't magically disappear from water once it has been added." Evidently, Helmenstein has never heard of the water cycle and evaporation. No, she explains how fluoride is a permanent contamininant. In her article "How to Remove Fluoride from Drinking Water", she doesn't mention the possibility of drinking rainwater or your own well water, and she makes distilled water sound scary: "keep in mind that 'distilled water' does not imply that a product is suitable for drinking water and other undesirable impurities may be present."
Perhaps in a health topic such as Thyroid Disease, there's room for pseudoscience. But in chemistry, there's little excuse. And even more inexcusable, is that neither author identifies their opinion as a minority opinion or links to counterarguments.
Interestingly, the one About.com article they link to that supports fluoride is Relationship Between Florinated Water And Cancer, in the Holistic Healing topic. It would be more accurately titled "No Relationship Between Florinated Water And Cancer": maybe that's why they listed it, by accident.
But a search of About.com with the keyword "fluoridation" doesn't find any other articles supporting fluoridation, or opposing the cranks against fluoridation.
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End Fluoridation, say 600+ Professionals
In a statement released August 9, 2007, over 600 dentists, physicians, scientists and environmentalists urge Congress to stop water fluoridation until Congressional hearings are conducted. They cite new scientific evidence that fluoridation, long promoted to fight tooth decay, is ineffective and has serious health risks. (http://www.fluorideaction.org/statement.august.2007.html)
Signers include a Nobel Prize winner, three members of the prestigious 2006 National Research Council (NRC) panel that reported on fluoride’s toxicology, two officers in the Union representing professionals at EPA headquarters, the President of the International Society of Doctors for the Environment, and hundreds of medical, dental, academic, scientific and environmental professionals, worldwide.
Signer Dr. Arvid Carlsson, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Medicine, says, “Fluoridation is against all principles of modern pharmacology. It's really obsolete.”
Paul Connett, PhD, Executive Director of the Fluoride Action Network (FAN), announced that an Online Action Petition to Congress in support of the Professionals' Statement is available at FAN's web site, www.fluorideaction.org.
“The NRC report dramatically changed scientific understanding of fluoride's health risks," says Connett. "Government officials who continue to promote fluoridation must testify under oath as to why they are ignoring the powerful evidence of harm in the NRC report,” he added.
An Assistant NY State Attorney General calls the report “the most up-to-date expert authority on the health effects of fluoride exposure.”
The Professionals’ Statement also references:
-- The new American Dental Association policy recommending infant formula NOT be prepared with fluoridated water.
-- The CDC’s concession that the predominant benefit of fluoride is topical not systemic.
-- CDC data showing that dental fluorosis, caused by fluoride over-exposure, now impacts one third of American children.
-- Major research indicating little difference in decay rates between fluoridated and non-fluoridated communities.
-- A Harvard study indicating a possible link between fluoridation and bone cancer.
-- The silicofluoride chemicals used for fluoridation are contaminated industrial waste and have never been FDA- approved for human ingestion.
The Environmental Working Group (EWG), a DC watchdog, revealed that a Harvard professor concealed the fluoridation/bone cancer connection for three years. EWG President Ken Cook states, “It is time for the US to recognize that fluoridation has serious risks that far outweigh any minor benefits, and unlike many other environmental issues, it's as easy to end as turning off a valve at the water plant.”
This Quackwatch article, Fluoridation: Don't Let the Poisonmongers Scare You! describes the tactics used above by nyscof, who has posted the same thing elsewhere.
Typical is the attempt to justify unscientific claims with a petition. Look at the credentials of the petitioners, and you find a catalog of pretty much every crank medical belief you can name, including accupuncture and chiropractic. Nor does a Nobel prize winner's opinion really mean much outside of his field: signal transduction in the nervous system is not quite the same as public health. Hstorically, it's been common for Nobel prizewinners to make appalling comments outside their field as William Shockley and Linus Pauling have.
I did a little research: The NRC report Fluoride in Drinking Water: A Scientific Review of EPA's Standards presents no evidence of harm at normal fluoridation levels of 1mg/L. Read it in the free PDF summary.
"The committee's conclusions regarding the potential for adverse effects from fluoride at 2 to 4 mg/L in drinking water do not address the lower exposures commonly experienced by most U.S. citizens."
Essentially, their conclusion is that there's no definitive research at the higher levels of fluoride in water excepting some cosmetic dental fluorosis.
Common sense says that if 190+ million Americans are being harmed by their fluoridated drinking water, even in minuscule percentages, we'd have noticed by now. The widespread use of much more strongly fluoridated toothpaste would make it even more obvious.
Hey, I thought I'd share something I ran across:
http://www.mises.org/books/TRTS/
"The Illustrated Road to Serfdom"
From our good friends, the Austrians, it is nothing less than the libertarian equivalent of a Jack Chick tract. Wild-ass speculation in the name of ideological prejudices.
Propaganda any way you cut it.
Off subject:
Thought you might have a comment on this debate between Naomi Klein and
the most famous living "libertarian republican" Alan Greenspan.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/24/1412226
Once again we are treated to a cut-and-paste of propaganda by anti-fluoridationists.
The British Medical Journal article which is cited is discussed by the editor, in this editorial. She writes:
"Objective though they strive to be, my reading is that Cheng and colleagues come down against fluoridation because of uncertainty about its safety, questions of autonomy, and because there are other ways of preventing caries."
That is an astoundingly harsh judgement for such a journal, and essentially a warning against using it the way nyscof does.
Sometimes the truth isn't pretty.
This is an uncut memo by the British researchers, themselves, who are tired of people using their reseasrch to indicate fluoridation is safe and effective when that's not what they found, at all.
What the 'York Review' on the fluoridation of drinking water really found
Originally released : 28 October 2003
A statement from the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD).
In 1999, the Department of Health commissioned CRD to conduct a systematic review into the efficacy and safety of the fluoridation of drinking water. The review specifically looked at the effects on dental caries/decay, social inequalities and any harmful effects. The review was published on the CRD Fluoridation Review website and in the BMJ in October 2000.
We are concerned about the continuing misinterpretations of the evidence and think it is important that decision makers are aware of what the review really found. As such, we urge interested parties to read the review conclusions in full at http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/pdf/summary.pdf.
We were unable to discover any reliable good-quality evidence in the fluoridation literature world-wide.
What evidence we found suggested that water fluoridation was likely to have a beneficial effect, but that the range could be anywhere from a substantial benefit to a slight disbenefit to children's teeth.
This beneficial effect comes at the expense of an increase in the prevalence of fluorosis (mottled teeth). The quality of this evidence was poor.
An association with water fluoride and other adverse effects such as cancer, bone fracture and Down's syndrome was not found. However, we felt that not enough was known because the quality of the evidence was poor.
The evidence about reducing inequalities in dental health was of poor quality, contradictory and unreliable.
Since the report was published in October 2000 there has been no other scientifically defensible review that would alter the findings of the York review. As emphasised in the report, only high-quality studies can fill in the gaps in knowledge about these and other aspects of fluoridation. Recourse to other evidence of a similar or lower level than that included in the York review, no matter how copious, cannot do this.
The full report is available via the CRD Fluoridation Review web site (http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/fluorid.htm). For more information, please contact Paul Wilson (01904 321073).
http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/fluoridnew.htm
More cut-and-paste, though this time with a misleading preface. The statement quoted painstakingly doesn't say which side is misrepresenting the report, yet nyscof declares it's the other side. That's dishonest.
If you read the summary, they grade research into A, B, and C levels based on how well the possibility of researcher bias is excluded.
The evidence for beneficial effects is level B, which is a medium (not unacceptable) level. And that evidence shows a likely substantial effect.
The evidence for fluorosis is level C, which is a low level.
The evidence for other effects was poor (level C.)
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