Judge Rules Fluoride IS Neurotoxic in Fluoride Lawsuit

In a May 12 ruling, federal Judge Edward Chen put on hold the lawsuit requesting fluoridation be banned based on fluoride’s adverse neurological effects until 3 new studies are peer-reviewed, 2 of which preliminarily show fluoride’s harm, according to InsideEPA.com. He also awaits the conclusion of a US National Toxicology Program analysis of fluoride which, in draft form, declared "…fluoride is presumed to be a cognitive neurodevelopmental hazard to humans.”

As of June 2021, 69 of 77 human fluoride-IQ studies found a reduced IQ among children with higher fluoride exposure.  Very strong evidence shows that fluoride damages both the fetal and infant brain at the levels used to artificially fluoridate water. Additionally, over 400 animal, cell and human studies link fluoride to neurological effects.

Unnecessary and unnatural fluoride chemicals are added to 73% of US water supplies in a failed attempt to reduce tooth decay in tap water drinkers.

Federal Case No. 17-CV-02162-EMC, challenging water fluoridation safety, was brought by several environmental groups and individuals led by Food & Water Watch and the Fluoride Action Network (FAN).  Plaintiffs argue that fluoride is neurotoxic to children and should not be added to water supplies, which would effectively end artificial water fluoridation.

Instead of using fluoridation-promoting government officials to vouch for fluoridation safety, EPA hired employees from the consulting firm, Exponent Inc., Some call Exponent a "Science for Hire" firm which “…routinely bend conclusions to the needs of clients.”  The cost to the taxpayers = approximately $350,000. 

A recent expose' revealed that EPA "scientists are afraid of retaliation for trying to implement TSCA the way Congress intended, and they fear that their actions (or inactions) at the direction of management are resulting in harm to human health and the environment.”

Despites repeated claims that fluoridation is safe, fluoridation-promoting government and dental agencies could provide no proof of safety regarding fluoride's effects to the nervous system.   

Representatives for EPA, CDC and FDA could not provide, in their testimony, any scientific studies showing fluoridation is safe. All agreed fluoride has no benefits prenatally. 

EPA admits that fluoride is a chemical with "Substantial Evidence of Developmental Neurotoxicity," but is haggling over the exact levels while our children pose as lab rats in this ongoing experiment. EPA's current safe water fluoride contaminant levels are set to protect against bone and teeth damage; but fail to consider fluoride's proven neurological effects.

The experts who testified for plaintiffs include: 

Kathleen M. Thiessen, Ph.D. a risk assessment scientist at Oak Ridge Center for Risk Analysis in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

   

Dr. Thiessen testified that “The animal data on fluoride neurotoxicity are consistent with the epidemiological data in showing a risk of cognitive deficits at doses of fluoride ingested from fluoridated water.”

A Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Phillipe Grandjean is on the faculty of Harvard University and the University of Southern Denmark. He’s received multiple awards throughout his long career for his research on the effects of environmental toxins affecting children and has also been recognized for his advocacy in protecting future generations from the effects of neuro- and developmental toxins.

 

Dr. Grandjean testified that "… there is little doubt that developmental neurotoxicity is a serious risk associated with elevated fluoride exposure, whether due to community water fluoridation, natural fluoride release from soil minerals, or tea consumption, especially when the exposure occurs during early development."

Dr. Howard Hu, from the University of Washington’s School of Public Health, has led international research teams investigating the environmental, nutritional, social, and epi/genetic causes of chronic disease and impaired child development in the USA, Mexico, India, China, and elsewhere around the world.

 

Dr. Hu advises pregnant women and infants to avoid fluoride ingestion to assure normal brain development (Journal of Pediatrics “Current Best Evidence,” July 2020). He wrote, "Fluoride is not essential for growth and development, a cautious step could be avoidance of fluoridated products and water by women during pregnancy and by infants during the first 6 months of life."

Dr. Lanphear is on the faculty at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, where his research focuses on preventing common diseases and disabilities in children, as well as quantifying the impact of risk factors to children’s health including exposures to heavy metals and chemicals.

An Op-Ed by Dr. Lanphear; Linda Birnbaum, PhD, Former Director, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences; and Christine Till, PhD, co-author of the JAMA-Pediatrics research article “Association Between Maternal Fluoride Exposure During Pregnancy and IQ Scores in Offspring in Canada”  reported:

 

“Mounting evidence suggests fluoride may be hampering brain development and reducing kids' IQ. The US needs to rethink this exposure for pregnant women and children.” 

JAMA Pediatrics Journal editor Dimitri Christakis, MD, said. “I would advise them [pregnant women] to drink bottled water or filtered water because it is not a particularly odious thing to do and actually does reduce the risk,” in a discussion of the JAMA Pediatrics fluoride/IQ study. 

Fluoridation was declared safe for 75 years. “Yet, studies conducted in North America examining the safety of fluoride exposure in pregnancy were nonexistent,” write Till and Green in “Controversy: The evolving science of fluoride: when new evidence doesn’t conform with existing beliefs.” Till and Green both advise pregnant women to avoid fluoride. 

Dr. Till's youtube presentation about her research which garnered intense scrutiny before being published in JAMA-Pediatrics is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp3L_jwJtio 

EPA scientists, in a recent research paper, write "Fluoride was observed to have the greatest increase in impacting cognitive ability and it is often reported to affect memory and cause cognitive deficits."  (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, July 2020)  

EPA scientists, in a recent research paper, write ""Fluoride was observed to have the greatest increase in impacting cognitive ability and it is often reported to affect memory and cause cognitive deficits."  (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, July 2020)  

Recently, An Australian legislator/PhD who read every official government fluoridation report, mostly from the WHO, Australia, UK and the US, says all of the reports assumed fluoridation safety.  She was shocked to discover the actual data doesn't support that assumption. 

More on the fluoride lawsuit here: https://fluoridealert.org/issues/tsca-fluoride-trial/

 

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Fluoridation: A 75-Year-Old Blunder

January 25, 2020 -- Seventy-five years ago, dentists convinced government officials to experiment on every Grand Rapids, Michigan, resident without individual informed-consent to prove that (not if) dosing the municipal water supply with untested sodium-fluoride chemicals would decay-proof children’s developing teeth. The experiment failed; but it spread across the country anyway.

Today, tooth decay is an epidemic among Grand Rapids' children.

"The typical child that comes in to us between 3 to 8, 9 years old and they could have anywhere from 3 to 20 cavities," said Dr. Darren Riopelle of Smile One who sees it first hand as a pediatric dentist. "It's a disease. If it's one tooth, it spreads to all the other teeth," reported WZZM

Last year more than 3,000 children in the Grand Rapids area had full mouth rehabilitation surgery under general anesthesia, they reported.

Planned to last 15 years, the 1945 Grand Rapids/Muskegon study ended prematurely after 6 ½ years.  Teeth of most children born into the experiment hadn’t even erupted yet. Muskegon, the planned non-fluoridated comparison city began fluoridating its water in 1951; thereby, negating the experiment. Fluoridationists changed the intent of the study,  further politicizing the experiment, by claiming water fluoridation reduced tooth decay in Grand Rapids by 65% in the 6 1/2 year experiment but failed to share the evidence that rates declined in non-fluoridated Muskegon concurrently.

Additional flaws are detailed In the book “Fluoridation - Errors and Omissions in Experimental Trials.”

Even the CDC admitted in 2001 that "Despite the strengths of early studies of the efficacy of naturally occurring fluoride in community drinking water, the limitations of these studies make summarizing the quality of evidence on community water fluoridation as Grade I inappropriate.”

An American Dental Association (ADA) news release admits, “many communities did not wait for the studies to be completed before starting their own fluoridation efforts.  By 1950, [fluoridation] had the full support of the ADA.”  Pressured by some Wisconsin dentists, the US Public Health Service recommended fluoridation in 1950, first; then the ADA and the American Medical Association followed.   All without safety evidence.

Grand Rapids citizens’ health was untested. But Newburgh NY’s healthy schoolchildren were examined in another 1945 human fluoridation experiment, also cut short prematurely. Newburgh school-kids suffered more bone defects, anemia and earlier female menstruation after 10 years (Journal of the American Dental Association, 1956). These findings were dismissed.

Pre-schoolers, adults and brain effects weren't examined.  Now 400 studies point to fluoride's neurological effects.

In 1951, those Wisconsin dentists strategized (“Proceedings 4^th annual conference of state dental directors”) on how to sell fluoridation using  misinformation and misdirection e.g. “We have told the public it works, so we can’t go back on that.” And “those research people, they can’t get over their feeling that you have to have test tube and animal research before you start applying it to human beings.”

Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, promoted fluoridation, consulting on strategy for the National Institute of Dental Research. “Selling fluoride was child’s play,” Bernays told the author of The Fluoride Deception. Bernays said citizens trust medical authority so he indoctinated doctors to believe in fluoridation without providing valid science and they, in turn, would and did pass that information to their patients, media and legislators - who failed to fact-check.  Modern day fluoridation PR flacks do the same. 

“Rational voices of opposition were suppressed from the start, reported Chemical & Engineering News in 1988. Science justified those fears. Fluoride isn’t a nutrient or required for healthy teeth, as early fluoridationists theorized and has serious side effects, rendering fluoridation unnecessary and harmful.

Valid criticism persists today, i.e. Legal Scholar Rita Barnett-Rose; Historian Catherine Carstairs, Phd; Social Scientist Brian Martin PhD; investigative reporters in Scientific American, Newsweek and ABC-TV.

Harvard Public Health Magazine reported in 2016 that "The [highly respected] Cochrane report also concluded that early scientific investigations on water fluoridation (most were conducted before 1975) were deeply flawed. “We had concerns about the methods used, or the reporting of the results, in … 97 percent of the studies,” the authors noted. 

Likewise, Dr. John Doull, toxicologist and chairman of the 2006 National Research Council's Fluoride Panel which reviewed fluoride toxicological studies told an investigative journalists writing for Scientific American:

     “What the committee found is that we’ve gone with the status quo regarding fluoride for many years—for too long, really—and now we need to take a fresh look. In the scientific community, people tend to think this is settled. I mean, when the U.S. surgeon general comes out and says this is one of the 10 greatest achievements of the 20th century, that’s a hard hurdle to get over. But when we looked at the studies that have been done, we found that many of these questions are unsettled and we have much less information than we should, considering how long this [fluoridation] has been going on. I think that’s why fluoridation is still being challenged so many years after it began. In the face of ignorance, controversy is rampant.”

Even earlier than that, a  National Institutes of Health (NIH) panel convened to evaluate tooth decay research and reported in  2001

"... the (NIH) panel was disappointed in the overall quality of the clinical data that it reviewed.  According to the panel, far too many studies were small, poorly described, or otherwise methodologically flawed" (over 560 studies evaluated fluoride use).

It seems not much as changed, The Journal of the American Dental Association just reported in 2020 that  abstracts published in dental journals don't always correctly reflect the actual research.

"Approximately one-third of the 75 RCT [Randomized Controlled Trials - the gold standard in research] abstracts published in high-impact dental journals in 2015 with nonsignificant outcomes presented with some form of spin, irrespective of funding type and journal impact factor."

Dental and other groups are celebrating fluoridation, ignoring strong fluoride/brain links,100 years of damning fluoride/kidney  ; thyroid research and evidence that cavity experience and inequities increased in the last 20 years despite widespread fluoridation contributing to US children’s fluoride-damaged teeth (fluorosis)

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