Those who followed the multi-year fluoride trial saga know, that the government’s much touted report[i] on whether fluoride harms children’s brain has finally been released and now sees the light of day. Getting it released at this late date wasn’t easy, as there seemed to be efforts to delay it and suppress it. It had been peer reviewed again, and reviewed again, to a farcical degree.
Release of report halted
The report and its effects of fluoride on the human brain is presented and discussed on the website of Fluoride Action Alert (FAN)[ii]. In addition to describing the actual findings, there are sub-pages on governmental suppression of the report, how the evidence on that was obtained and who were the top governmental officials in ordering the suppression of the release of the report. There is also a short video of former NTP director Linda Birnbaum giving her view on what this all means for the future of water fluoridation.
During the trial which has been going on for the past years, the plaintiff’s attorney learned that the report was completed and slated to be released in May of 2022. But its release was mysteriously halted, despite the fact that the judge in the fluoride trial was waiting for its release for more than a year, and it was supposedly needed in order to provide pivotal evidence in the trial after years of delay and waiting. Thanks to FOIA requests brought by the plaintiff’s attorneys, it was revealed that the release of the report had been secretly blocked by an order from someone high in the public health hierarchy: Admiral Levine, assistant Secretary of Health. The judge, exasperated, ordered that the preliminary version of the report be released to the court, so that its conclusions could be brought into evidence and the trial could be completed. This, on his part, allowed the final leg of the trial to be completed this past February; however, it is September, and we all are still awaiting a verdict.
18 of 19 studies show impact on intelligence
Now that we have the official National Toxicology Program (NTP) report, it is time to ask: what does it say? Are there any surprises to be found in it? In its description of the scientific details, the report did find confirmation, as expected, of fluoride as being toxic to children’s brains. Of the 19 highest quality studies, 18 of them found that higher levels of fluoride exposure were significantly associated with lower intelligence in children. But there were some statements in the report that will give the dental establishment something to cling to: the clearest evidence that fluoride is a brain neurotoxin was found at levels of 1.5 parts per million, which is higher than the 0.7 parts per million that the CDC now recommends for water fluoridation. (1)
Multiplicity of factors add to fluoride exposure
But a counter to that argument presented by FAN is that total fluoride intake – with some coming from food, toothpastes, drugs, and pollution – varies greatly, and susceptibility varies greatly too, with some people being harmed more easily than others. So, each side of the fluoride debate will still have talking points in the ongoing argument over fluoridation, and the big media will obviously favor the vested interests that make up the fluoride promoters.
Fluoride in the food supply and pharmaceutical increase exposure
Those who have followed the fluoride issue know how broad and powerful those players on the fluoride team are. According to the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology (IAOMT), fluoride is found at much higher levels in many beverages and foods than it is in fluoridated water.[iii] So Big Ag and Big Food want the fluoride cover-up. Big Pharma knows that about ten per-cent of its drugs use fluorine as an ingredient, including Prozac and the notorious antibiotic, Cipro (They both carry FDA black box warnings)[iv]. Heavy industry, from steel to coal, aluminum factories and phosphate fertilizer plants pose a hazard to workers and nearby communities alike. (2)(3)
ADA and media can’t admit they were wrong
In particular, the phosphate fertilizer plants are capturing their hazardous fluoride fumes to keep them out of the environment and then have the gall to sell them to chemical companies[v] who peddle them to city water works, which put the toxic waste into the water people drink – that’s what is called water fluoridation. So heavy industry does want to let go of the myths about fluoride being “safe and effective.” Big dentistry, as with the American Dental Association doesn’t want to admit that it was profoundly wrong over the last 80 years in insisting that every dental student in every dental school be taught that fluoride use and water fluoridation are fundamentally needed to assure children’s dental health. Big media itself has a stake in the debate, because it doesn’t want to admit that it was profoundly negligent in its coverage of the fluoride issue over the last 80 years.
Team Fluoride
According to Bryson in his book “The Fluoride Deception”,[vi] instead of telling the public about what honest scientists had actually found, it has steadfastly held to the lies and the cover-up of the dental-industrial-governmental establishment when telling us what to believe. So, we shouldn’t expect the big players of Team Fluoride to admit that they have been in the wrong, and this will even be true regardless of what verdict the trial judge in the fluoride lawsuit comes up with. If the defendant, the Environmental Protection Agency loses, it likely may very well appeal the verdict, thus allowing the harm to America’s children to continue on for months and maybe years.
Expert fired; computers destroyed by “accident”?
It has never been easy for the scientific truth about fluoride to see the light of day. The great toxicologist Phyllis Mullenix, PhD, seemed destined to turn the tide against the fluoride myths when she found powerful evidence in 1989-1990 that
fluoride was toxic to her test animals. She had the integrity to publish anyway[vii], despite warnings that she would lose her prestigious job at the Forsyth Dental Institute, if she did so. By 1994, she had been given a termination notice from Forsyth and in the final months of being there before she left, her multi-million high tech computer equipment had been destroyed, harmed by an inexplicable “rain” that had fallen from the ceiling. And the well cared for test animals had mysteriously taken ill and died. She never got another NIH grant or a job anywhere, in any university or research facility.[viii] In recalling her treatment by Forsyth and by the NIH research establishment, she described her experience as “Mister Toad’s Wild Ride.”
Crops and farm animals severely harmed
She had come to know first-hand how government and industry bias could trump science of the highest quality. But to her astonishment, it would rise to new heights in 1997, after several reporters contacted her and told her about of the real origins of water fluoridation, going back to the 1940s and the atomic bomb project (“The Manhattan Project”). DuPont’s chemical facility in Deepwater, Delaware, was facing a flurry of lawsuits from farmers who, being near the plant, had crops and farm animals that were severely harmed by toxic
fluoride from the chemical plant. The plant was being used to make uranium hexafluoride, needed for Uranium isotope separation for the bomb project. It was Harold Hodge, PhD, the bomb project’s chief fluoride expert, who boldly proposed that the dental establishment should send around a memo to the communities in New Jersey claiming, falsely of course, that a little bit of fluoride in their drinking water would protect children’s teeth from decay.[ix] [x]
Harold Hodge, PhD
America’s biggest scientific fraudster?
Hodge also brazenly green-washed the image of fluoride for industrial plants that were exposing their workers to unsafe amounts of fluoride. Hodge’s own research found that fluoride was harmful to the teeth of workers – most of them lost all of their teeth! – but Hodge falsified the evidence in a published scientific article that provided for the fluoride cover-up needs of American industry, including the bomb project which employed tens of thousands of workers, many of whom were disabled and many who died.[xi] In short, Harold Hodge, who died in 1990, known as America’s leading fluoride expert, was actually America’s biggest scientific fraudster and one who did incalculable harm to America in the sweep of time since then. (10) Most people never learn that there is such a thing as a criminal-scientist.
CIA and Department of Defense role?
The revelations about the origins of fluoridation, Harold Hodge, and the bomb project particularly touched Phyllis Mullenix personally when she learned about them in 1997. For, the bizarre twist is that in the final years of Hodge’s life, he worked at Forsyth Dental Institute alongside Phyllis Mullenix as a sort of a fluoride research team helper. In a kindly way, he was always curious about her progress and what she was finding out. What she was finding out in 1989-1990, Harold Hodge had already secretly discovered half a century earlier in the 1940s, reported to all the players in government and the defense department but then lied about in his statements to the media and the public and in his published scientific papers.[xii] His role at Forsyth was, in all probability, to be a mole, to report the research findings to the CIA (which he had deep connections with) as well as the DOD and other government contacts. He was likely a spy for those who wanted to know the scientific truth but also to keep a lid on what the public would be allowed to know.
So, with that, Phyllis more fully understood the depth of the fluoride cover-up. The powers that be wanted to know the truth about fluoride, including its harmful effects on the brain and behavior. But that was to better manage the use of fluoride and its impacts on brains and behavior, not to reverse course on a program that was harming American’s health. When they brazenly asked her not to publish her important results, they expected her to fall in line and keep quiet to protect her career as a scientist.
Christopher Bryson
The Fluoride Deception
This story and much more is covered in Christopher Bryson’s book The Fluoride Deception (2004). At 374 pages, and with thousands of scientific references and citations, this is the work of a brave world-class investigative journalist who covered the scientific excellence and bravery of the top scientific researchers of the last century. The book has chapters on Europe’s top fluoride researcher, Kaj Roholm.
Back in the 1940s, Roholm was a brilliant and honest Danish researcher who, unlike Harold Hodge, told the truth on his continent publishing a 354-page book on it.[xiii] But because of Roholm’s integrity, most of mainland Europe learned of the harmful effects of fluoride and never fluoridated its water.
EPA “experts” ignorant of key research
In the closing hours of the epochal fluoride trial, EPA’s science expert, David Savitz was asked to comment on the work of Phyllis Mullenix and Kaj Roholm. But he claimed he knew nothing of them and had never heard of them. So, the works of Mullenix and Roholm never became part of the record in the fluoride trial because EPA ‘experts’ knew nothing about them.
Conclusion?
What most people believe about fluoride is wrong. That is the intended result of decades of media-government and ADA misinformation. That misinformation persists regardless of what Phyllis Mullenix or any other scientist has published. Old cover-ups die hard. There are powerful interests that want to keep them in place. Do not expect to be handed the truth on a silver platter by a governmental agency. If a governmental body imposes a heavy-handed health measure on you, it is good to be skeptical and to push back.
Endnotes:
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[i] National Toxicology Program: NTP Monograph on the State of the Science Concerning Fluoride Exposure and Neurodevelopment and Cognition: A Systematic Review, Report Date: August 2024, located online Sept 20, 2024 @ https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/publications/monographs/mgraph08
[ii] Fluoride Action Network (FAN) website viewed online Sept. 20, 2024 @ https://fluoridealert.org/key-topics/ntp-report/
[iii] International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology (IAOMT), Fluoride Exposure and Human Health Risks on IOAMT website viewed online Sept 20, 2024 @ https://iaomt.org/resources/fluoride-facts/fluoride-exposure-human-health-risks/
[iv] Second Look website: Fluoride Toxicity Research Collaborative, Index of Fluoridate Pharmaceuticals, accessed online Sept 20, 2024, @ https://www.slweb.org/ftrcfluorinatedpharm.html
[v] The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson, Chapter 11, “As Vital to our National Life as a Spark Plug to a Motor Car”.
[vi] The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson, Chapter 6, “How the Manhattan Project Sold Us Fluoride: Newburgh, Harshaw, and Jim Conant’s Ruse”. Also, Chapter 14 “Fluorine Lawyers and Government Dentists” tells how big corporations used governmental agencies to battle the claims of pollution victims and workers in court.
[vii] Neurotoxicity of Sodium Fluoride in Rats, Mullenix et al, Neurotoxicology and Teratology, Vol 17, No 2, pp 169-177, 1995, accessed online Sept 20, 2024@ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/089203629400070T
[viii] The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson, Chapter 2, “Fireworks at Forsyth”.
[ix] The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson, Chapter 5, “General Groves’ Solution: Dr. Harold Hodge and the University of Rochester”.
[x] Fluoride, Teeth and the A-Bomb, by Griffiths, J and Bryson, C, Earth Island Journal, winter 1997-1998, pp 38-41.
[xi] The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson, Chapter 6, “How the Manhattan Project Sold Us Fluoride: Newburgh, Harshaw, and Jim Conant’s Ruse”.
[xii] Fluoride Poisoning: A Puzzle with Hidden Pieces, by Mullenix, P Intl Journal of Occupational and Environment Health, Oct-Dec, 2005, Vol 11, No 4. This article by Mullenix exposes the fraudulent information about fluoride that Harold Hodge published in the Journal of the American Dental Association (JADA) in 1948. With the publication of this expose paper by Mullenix it became part of the recognized body of science that Harold Hodge had used false data and committed serious scientific fraud in his 1948 JADA article and in the following decades of his career.
[xiii] Fluorine Intoxication: A Clinical and Hygienic Study, with review of the literature and some experimental investigation, by Roholm, Kaj 1937. Roholm’s encyclopedic study of fluoride pollution and poisoning was translated into English; he was cordially invited to America to meet with NIH officials to fully share his research findings and his views that were very different from those of the Americans. After returning to Copenhagen, Denmark, things did not go well for Roholm. He died within a few months of an aggressive cancer.
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