Do you agree that it should be your choice whether or not you take a medication? If you do, then 97% of Europe agrees with you. They have eliminated fluoride from their public water systems because they’ve realized one critical point: Compulsive systematic medication violates basic human rights. In Auckland, we still have no choice. Whether we like it or not, we are currently medicated with a highly controversial substance every day we live here.
Tonight, we are privileged to have Dr. Paul Connett with us to update us on the latest research about fluoride and how it’s affecting us. Dr. Connett is the executive director of the Fluoride Action Network as well as the executive director of its parent body The American Environmental Health Studies Project. He’s given more than 2,000 presentations in 49 states and 52 countries on the issue of waste management. He holds a PhD in Chemistry and is a retired professor of environmental chemistry and toxicology. He’s also the author of the book The Case Against Fluoride and is on our advisory board in the Awareness Party.
Get ready to be woken up, shaken up, and empowered. Please welcome Dr. Paul Connett.
Dr. Paul Connett:
Let me start by saying this: Fluoridation is one of the easiest health problems that we have to end. It’s the easiest one that we can end. We can end it by turning off a tap. All we need is a strong wrist, a strong wrist. We can turn off this unnecessary evil at the waterworks, but to turn that tap, we need political will. To get that political will, we need masses of people informed and organized.
I didn’t say entertained. I hope that you will enjoy my presentation this evening, but if you go away here entertained but not ready to take action, then it’s a waste of time. So, hopefully, you’re going to be informed, and you’re going to want to be organized. I will be telling you one step that you could take which could begin the ball rolling.
Monday is the deadline for submissions of this to your Council to get it into the annual plan or whatever the bureaucratic rubric is to get this issue before the Council. You could sign this document. You could make this submission. You could add your own words at the bottom as we heard some eloquent words right now. They will be excellent to add to this, and when you’ve filled out this form give it to Marina over here. She’s our representative from New Zealand. Now, I’m going to break off my talk very close to the end to get these forms out, get them signed, get them to Marina, and we will know that this meeting has had an impact right away.
Okay. I have spent the last 17 years researching the fluoridation issue, first as a professor of chemistry specializing in environmental chemistry and toxicology, and then the director of FAN. I’m happy to tell you that the person that got me into this 17 years ago, who twisted my arm with a cup of tea in the afternoon, my wife, is here with me, Ellen, Ellen Connett.
Amongst other things, the other major contribution that she’s made to this movement is having our son Michael. For seven or eight years, Michael made a website, and then he took the time off to become a lawyer. Now, he’s clocking for a federal law judge in Philadelphia, but he’s got involved again with the Fluoride Action Network. He revamped the website, and if you’ve never to our website, the FlourideAlert.org, that’s Michael. That’s my son.
One of the things he’s done is to make this huge health database, and one of the buttons you can click on is “researches”. Anybody that’s researching this issue, click on “researches”, and you’ll get to the health database. There are about 14 tissues examined separately, fluoride in the kidney, fluoride in the brain, fluoride in the bone, and so on. All the literature reviewed is linked. Full articles are there, and in addition to that, he had the idea of getting of these papers that had been written in China translated to English so that they would become available for Western researchers. That has proved very significant.
How many of you heard me before? Just to get an idea. Okay, it’s quite a few. This is more or less what you heard last time, but it’s been updated, particularly with the whole issue of fluoride and the brain. So, there is new information here.
After 14 years of this, I got together with two other scientists. We wrote this book, and one of the best decisions I think I made in 17 years was to ask James Beck, MD, PhD, a physicist from Calgary, Alberta, and Spedding, a biologist trained in Oxford and teaching at Edinburgh University. So, we have three retired professors, one in biology, one in chemistry, one in physics, and we wrote this book.
I cannot tell you what a wonderful contribution these other two made. They got the term right; this book is understated, not overstated. Everything is documented, and they don’t go into attacking. They certainly acknowledged some of the arguments, the other side, and every single argument is documented in the scientific literatures, eighty pages of references there. Believe me, this is your protection.
One of the things about citizens is they don’t want to be embarrassed. They don’t want to go out into the public and say something and be embarrassed, and the other side makes a special art of embarrassing people. If you only knew as much as they do, you’d realize that you were stupid. That’s the message that comes from these experts, but believe me, after two years, they have no answer to this book.
There’s been no scientific response critique of this book. So, if you get attacked in public, if you’re made to feel that you are a member of the flat earth society or you put on a tin foil hat or whatever they do to put you down, just wave this book and say, “Have you got a response to this book? Have you produced a written response to this? By the way, are you prepared to debate Professor Connett because he will come back to New Zealand? So, if you could pluck a courage and defend your position in public, he will debate you. Are you ready to debate him? Yes or no? Put up or shut up.”
I’m very, very tired of being insulted by people who have not read the literature, who think it’s good enough to quote a movie made in 1964 to counteract all the signs we’ve put on the table. The movie, of course, is Doctor Strangelove.
So, the outline of my talk. I will explain that fluoridation is a poor medical practice, that it’s unethical. The evidence of any benefit is very weak. There’s no adequate margin of safety to protect from known health effects. Why does the New Zealand Ministry of Health continue to push fluoridation? We have to conjecture them, and better alternatives. Then, certainly, how can you help to end fluoridation in Auckland. That’s where we’re going to break off before I talk about that to deal with these submissions.
Okay. It’s a poor medical practice. Fluoridation is the only example in New Zealand of using the public water supply to deliver medicine, and why not? Well, for obvious reasons, once you put a medicine into the water, you can’t control who it goes to. It goes to babies. It goes to infants. It goes to children. It goes to the elderly. It goes to the sick. It goes to people with poor nutrition. It goes to people with poor kidney function who, in the case of fluoride, can’t get rid of fluoride. It goes to people with borderline iodine deficiency, and they’re particularly vulnerable to fluoride toxicity.
Ask a pharmacist if there’s any medicine in his store that he can give to anybody, everybody. Of course, not. You can’t. Then ask him if there’s any medicine that you don’t have to control the dose. Take as much as you want. Drink as much water as you want. It’s ridiculous. You can’t control who it goes to. You can’t control the dose.
In New Zealand, it’s worse. No doctor has prescribed this medication. Nobody’s tracking individual response. Doctors in medical schools are not trained to recognize the side effects of fluoride. No New Zealand health agency is monitoring its exposure. There’s no monitoring in New Zealand of the level of fluoride in people’s urine, in their blood, and, most particularly, in their bones.
By now, you should have thousands and thousands of data points. You should know how much fluoride you can expect to have in your bones as a function of how many years you’ve been drinking fluoridated water. How many data points do you have? Zero. None. How many health studies have you got in New Zealand? Zero. First of all, it’s a lousy experiment, but it’s the lousiest experiment because you’re not even collecting the data.
Fluoride is not a nutrient. To demonstrate that a substance is a nutrient, you have to starve an animal of this substance in its diet. Take it away, and then demonstrate that some disease accrues. If no disease accrues, then it’s not a nutrient. Nobody’s ever demonstrated a fluoride deficiency disease, a disease caused by fluoride deficiency. Dental disease is not caused by lack of fluoride. Dental disease is caused by too much sugar. There’s not one single biochemical process, any biological molecule, any biological reaction, any process in the body that needs fluoride. Forcing people to drink it is stupid since they cannot identify one single thing going on in the body that needs fluoride.
Fluoride is a known toxic substance. So, in the contrast of the fact that they cannot identify anything that fluoride’s good for, we have identified what harm it can cause. It could interfere with enzymes, inhibit enzymes, and now we know it could do much more than that. It could interfere with G-proteins, the signaling mechanisms across membranes. It could cause oxidative stress. It could interfere with hydrogen bonds. It could complex with metal ions that we need and metal ions that we don’t need. It could get those metal ions into places that they, otherwise, wouldn’t go.
The first opponents of fluoridation in the United States were biochemists, biochemists that had used fluoride in their experiments to poison enzymes. They realized that this substance should not go anywhere near the body’s systems. Two Nobel prizes in enzyme chemistry opposed fluoridation, one from Sweden and one from the United States.
The chemicals used are not pharmaceutical grade, as used in dental products. They come from the wet scrubbers, a spray of water, of the phosphate fertilizer industry, and these are designed to capture two toxic gases, hydrogen fluoride and silicon tetrafluoride, which, for a hundred years, decimated the vegetation in the area of phosphate processing plants. Crippled cattle, damaged the citrus groves in Florida.
Once you captured this scrubbing liquor, which is a solution is hexafluorosalicylic acid, what can they do with that scrubbing liquor? What can’t they do with it? They can’t dump it into the sea by international law. They can’t dump it locally because it’s far too concentrated. It would cost an arm and a leg to get rid of it as a hazardous waste, but we have this vaguery in hazardous waste regulations that if someone buys a hazardous waste or from the chemical industry, it becomes, then, a product. On that basis, they can put it into the drinking water.
These industrial grade chemicals contain many pollutants, and one of them, usually present in the batches tested, is arsenic.
Arsenic is a known human carcinogen, and, at least from the point-of-view of the US EPA, there is no safe level for a human carcinogen. That means that inevitably by using these industrial grade chemicals to fluoridate the water, you are increasing the cancer rates in New Zealand. We can argue about how much or how big or how small this increase is, but what they cannot deny is there will be an increase because arsenic is a known human carcinogen with no safe level. That’s over-and-above the possibility that fluoride itself causes cancer.
