August 17, 2008
I am happy to tell you that an edited version of Dr. Howard's August 11, 2008, Toronto presentation "Fluoride and the Developing Nervous System" is now available on Google video. This 30-minute tape can be accessed at
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=407241655905...
One small historical correction. Dr. Howard refers to a 1984 WHO report which used a paper by Murray and Rugg-Gunn (1982) which cited 120 papers which supposedly supported the effectiveness of fluoridation for fighting tooth decay. In this connection he cited Dr. Philip Sutton's devastating critique of this paper which had been used to underpin WHO's updated endorsement of fluoridation. The correct date of Sutton's critique was 1989 (submitted in a letter to the Chemical and Engineering News) not 1959. WHO had first officially endorsed fluoridation in 1969 and the somewhat dubious process by which this occurred is documented in Waldbott et al's book "Fluoridation the Great Dilemma" pp 283-5.
The evidence that fluoride lowers IQ is stronger than we thought.
In Dr. Howard's presentation he used a systematic review of all the studies that have suggested that fluoride lowers IQ in children. 18 our of 20 studies have found this association. This review, authored by Michael Connett and Hardy Limeback, was presented at the International Association for Dental Research (IADR) in Toronto earlier this year. We have just found out that ANOTHER systematic review of this literature has been carried out by Chinese reviewers (Tang et al.). Their review appeared in the journal Biology of Trace Element Research and the abstract of the paper available is printed below. The authors, who only reviewed Chinese studies, concluded that "children who live in a fluorosis area have five times higher odds of developing low IQ than those who live in a nonfluorosis area or a slight fluorosis area."
This review paper underlines the importance of FAN's work not only in trying to end fluoridation worldwide by education and organization but also by making scientific research more available to both the public and the scientific community. It was FAN that had 19 Chinese studies on the brain translated into English. It was these studies which not only formed a large basis of the Connett/Limeback meta-analysis, but in addition, 12 of these English translations, were featured in a recent issue of the journal Fluoride. It is interesting that the Chinese authors of this second Meta-analysis cite the website of the journal fluoride (www.fluorideresearch.org) in their abstract below. It is thus conceivable that in addition to most of the western scientific community being unaware of these important Chinese studies, that some Chinese researchers may have been unaware of how extensively their own scientists have studied this issue.
A preliminary review of the 16 studies reviewed by the Chinese researchers (they did not review the recent papers from India, Mexico and Iran) indicates that there are some more studies from China of which we had been unaware. So there now appear to be over 20 studies which are associating a decrease in IQ with over-exposure to fluoride. With dental fluorosis now impacting 32% of American children (a clear indicator of over-exposure to fluoride before the permanent teeth have erupted) this should be a matter of grave concern for all those countries which practice water fluoridation.
Doubtless, diehard fluoridation promoters will claim that the exposures in these studies is "much higher" than exposures in fluoridated countries. However, such a rationale for dismissing their relevance is neither scientific nor responsible. Most of these studies were conducted on relatively small populations and to protect the whole population of children - with a large range of sensitivity due to different body weights, different diets (including the all-important iodine intake), different health status and kidney function -drinking uncontrolled amounts of water, juices and soft drinks (made using fluoridated water) as well as fluoride from many other sources - one needs to apply at least a margin of safety of 10 to be protective. The Xiang (2003) study estimated that IQ would be lowered at 1.8 ppm. There is simply NOT an adequate margin of safety to protect our whole population from fluoride's potential to interfere with developing brain, when consuming water at about 1 ppm, especially babies.
Nature gave its own verdict on this matter when it set the level of fluoride in mothers milk at 0.004 ppm (NRC, 2006, table 2-6), some 250 times lower than 1 ppm.
We have to get this message out to the more responsible and less brain-washed members of the medical community. This is what our Triple event in Toronto set out to do. In this Dr. Vyvyan Howard played a truly magnificent role.
Paul Connett
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Biol Trace Elem Res. (abstract distributed on PubMed, August, 2008)
Fluoride and Children's Intelligence: A Meta-analysis.
Tang QQ,, Du J, Ma HH , Jiang SJ,, Zhou XJ
Department of Pathology, Nanjing University School of Medicine, Nanjing Jinling Hospital, Nanjing, Jiangsu, 210002, People's Republic of China.
This paper presents a systematic review of the literature concerning fluoride that was carried out to investigate whether fluoride exposure increases the risk of low intelligence quotient (IQ) in China over the past 20 years. MEDLINE, SCI, and CNKI search were organized for all documents published, in English and Chinese, between 1988 and 2008 using the following keywords: fluorosis, fluoride, intelligence, and IQ. Further search was undertaken in the website www.fluorideresearch.org because this is a professional website concerning research on fluoride. Sixteen case-control studies that assessed the development of low IQ in children who had been exposed to fluoride earlier in their life were included in this review. A qualitative review of the studies found a consistent and strong association between the exposure to fluoride and low IQ. The meta-analyses of the case-control studies estimated that the odds ratio of IQ in endemic fluoride areas compared with nonfluoride areas or slight fluoride areas. The summarized weighted mean difference is -4.97 (95%confidence interval [CI] = -5.58 to -4.36; p < 0.01) using a fixed-effect model and -5.03 (95%CI = -6.51 to 3.55; p < 0.01) using a random-effect model, which means that children who live in a fluorosis area have five times higher odds of developing low IQ than those who live in a nonfluorosis area or a slight fluorosis area.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18695947?dopt=Abs...