has published a study which shows that the low what are you q relates to the plasma for right levels this is the level of florida in the in the blood before it goes into the brain just before and you can see with all his data points there is a decrease in showtunes too as the fluoride levels in the serum goes up so it's these measures of individual exposure which further strengthen our conclusions here now this is what from the that cause chemical brain drain that's his expression chemical brain drain effect of each toxic and may seem small but the combined damage on a population scale can be serious especially because the brain power  next generation is crucial to all of us and now i want to use a series of pitches to illustrate what he's getting at here and incidentally he's used the same pitch is a better draw in the mind in  videotape that's available on the web so you can look at his explanation but basically i q follows a normal distribution curve the the bell shaped curve the bell the heart of the bell is the average most people have an average if you're looking at height weight or in this case i q most people will be around the average that is but look at the two tails of this bell shaped  the green the area under the curve that's the number of kids above an i q of about one hundred thirty those kids of very bright or geniuses so if you look at the green area as a at this end of the curve the magenta is the frac of that area under the curve is the fraction of the population which is mentally handicapped now if you were to shift downwards by five i q points the so we wouldn't notice this unless we were doing careful studies we would notice that this is happening but look what this shift does to the two tails it harvests the number of geniuses in your society and it doubles the number of mentally handicapped and i don't think i need to say much to convince you that this would have huge social ramifications and economic ramifications for an industrialized society like the united states competing in a global economy if you have the number of geniuses in your society you have the potential to get your gates and people like that and you also double the number of children that are going to need social services for the rest of their lives and all the other social implications so i think it's clear that once you know that a chemical used in daily lives has this potential of shifting the i q downwards how much proof do you need before you say oh my god stop it now if this was a chemical byproduct from some process that we were really keen on supposing it was a contaminant from silicon valley where they're making all these computers which we want so desperately you know it would be tough wouldn't it tough to say here's something this incredible boon to the economy but we've got to stop using it because it might be lowering the i q of our children but what if it's something that we are deliberately  adding to the drinking water how much do you need before you turn off the tap how much more information do uni than two or three hundred animal and if they can't see that that's why you should be getting angry that's why you should be getting organized and bash these heads of these civil servants of yours and your counselors to stop this foolish practice mind at a time leading to one community at a time effecting change is like driving a nail through a piece of wood the expert can shop in the nile to affect change you need t hammer of public opinion that's the teamwork here i and people like bill was once in and other experts we can shop on the nail but now you have to take those the hammer and drive those nails home well download get somebody under twelve that we have to do it for you download it make teen copies and get it to everybody that you can think of especially your dentists and doctors there's my son made this one ten fax on freud which goes and this hasn't come from the millions of dollars spent by the c d c well the eighty eight they put all their money into propaganda it's the citizens who've made available the science on this subject including translating umpteen studies in chinese russian and others many citizens media and decision makers have little idea of the number and caliber of the people fighting for radiation around the world i can tell you i have had the privilege of going to communities all over australia all over new zealand all over canada or over the united states all over ireland and the several places in england i've been to israel and i've been to japan on this issue and i can tell you there are dozens and dozens of communities and those people are fighting for it ation not to make money not to get power they come to the meetings they working their tails off yassin using a lot of their own money why for their kids for their grandchildren and for their communities so i've had the privilege of working with some of the best people in the world of both fighting incineration and fighting for it ation as there's little difference from what i see this and it's exciting but seen visible i see it but most of you do not see it most of task that's why we are making this visible we need to make it visible and we need to bring all the groups and communities fighting purdie can together and for one alliance  alliance is the worldwide alliance to end fluoridation and i'm happy to tell you that this organization was one of the earliest groups to join that alliance so this is what we go to do we  doesn't know that yet we've got a lot of education to do that's it this is james corbett of corporate board dot com and i'm james i know a media monitor dot com and we both welcome you to a jam packed episode of the new world next week which of course you can find everything you need at new world next week dot com james let's not hesitate any longer let's get to the good news and show folks that yes portland remains fluoride free we'll take it from our own portland tribune as portland voters reject water fluoridation there weren't too many smiles tuesday night at the site of the election night party o turned down the idea of florida aiding the city's water supply quote at a very fundamental level people understand that we don't want more chemicals in our water in quotes said kim kaminski leader of a clean water portland at a campaign party for fluoride opponents the nonprofit upstream public health brought the idea of florida eating portland's water to the city councillors last year quietly building majority support on the council before the public really caught wind of the fluoride issue and it was all back on track in portland the council unanimously approved florida adding portland's water last september but the stealth campaign by supporters may have backfired fluoridation opponents with a little money or professional political help quickly gathered enough signatures to force a public referendum which happened yesterday may twenty first rick north member of clean water portland's steering committee said quote in thirty days we put together an operation that gathered forty three thousand signatures portland remains at the last major city in the united states without florida needed water and now that the voters have spoken yet again will remain so james we couldn't be very much more happy here in portland as as myself and my amazing girlfriend were pretty well involved in this fight of course like anything not as much as you really want to be i know the night before the vote i was kind of wringing my hands thinking maybe i didn't do enough i didn't do enough we're going to lose i didn't do it but it all turned out i think pretty well the interesting thing james is somebody i think there's a documentary film in this to be made and i think our sort of local alternative press i think really kind of showed what they're all about so here's the willamette week you can't handle the tooth why the far right and left came together to defeat fluoride and we also have the portland mercury here the same ist arguments against fluoride and why they're all still wrong so again these are pretty much the youngish magazines that you know if we had investigative journalism and we do a little bit here they'd see that the community organizations were bought off there's even new e mails showing that the florida lobbyist leaned on state legislators and even that's only just coming out in the last couple of days so the interesting note as you know we'd ask well if there's any investigative journalist maybe they could really kind of blow this story open wide but i can't help be reminded of in two thousand and eight a journalist for the portland mercury exposed our newly elected mayor's improper sexual relations and her reward was a sweet job with that mayor james r it would be like you deciding to take a job with monsanto after you expose that and go on maybe i should just go i'll go work for them we don't work that way james and i think this is a huge resounding victory it is it's a nice little victory for a change so let's just bask in it for a little while and this restores my faith in the people of pediatrics who may buy into the hope and change the kool aid but at any rate they're drinking clean fresh water for the time being i'm glad this this is happened and i think again this is a testament to what can happen when people come together from the left and the right the meaningless divide into two to come together on  issues of importance for everyone and as exactly as you say i think the important thing to take home from this is that the floor of the pro flouride side was extremely well funded and a political organization and all of that and the  floride was completely grassroots self organized grassroots campaign that came together and managed to to get the votes for the referee get the signatures for the referendum and managed to get it through just an incredible testament to what can be done when people really mobilized around an issue like this so my hats off to everyone in portland to help them and i would like to think too that you know not only did we win it but i'd like to think now that we'll be that bellwether for other cities park shoreline lympics view north shore mercer island tuck willow renton covington skyway coal creek creek and a number of additional water districts a full listing is provided on our web website q dot org the citizens of these cities and water districts have never had the opportunity to vote on the fluoridation of their water and we have had over forty five years of additional research on the effects of fluoride on human health since that seattle referendum in one nine hundred sixty eight the fluoridation of drinking water has been a controversial issue throughout its history as an environmental scientist and engineer with over twenty years of consulting experience i appreciate that scientific approach to controversial question there is a great deal of recent research on water fluoridation that we need to know about and understand and that's why i'm very pleased retired from his full professorship in chemistry at st lawrence university in canton new york where he taught for twenty three years his specialty is environmental chemistry and toxicology and he's an expert on the research related to the nature of fluoridation chemicals and their effects on human i particularly appreciate that dr kahn it takes a rational science based approach to this con a controversial topic he's studied the research literature on fluoride toxicity for over eighteen years and he fell and he helped to found the fluoride action network for which he is the executive director he speaks to audiences all over the world on the subject of water fluoridation is my great pleasure to introduce to you tonight dr thank you thank you scott very much forty seven years ago i became an activist on this very day on this very day forty seven years ago some patrick's day and the reason i became activists was i was walking across the cornell university campus at that point my i was i wanted to get a ph d in biochemistry and find a cure for cancer that was what was in my brain as a young englishman at that time at cornell and i've been doing that for about a year research into bio chemistry when i was crossing the campus and this great green dragon green dragon  path and i thought well this is intriguing i'll follow this green dragon and i thought of the green dragon which turned out to be fifty irishman st patrick's day and i followed it into the union building of the cornell that that very day going back to the lab and i could not concentrate i could not concentrate on science on molecules and test tubes and things knowing what these students were going through and getting an inkling of what might be happening to the to the vietnamese so i speak got involved in the viet nam peace movement which became the mccarthy for president campaign and then a whole series of other things but i am a walking example of what john lennon wrote in one of his songs beautiful line beautiful boy it's life is what happens when you're busy making other plans that's the story of my life and then the next event  in september of one hundred eighty three after a lot of political campaigns i started what i thought would be the quiet life at st lawrence university i went there was going to teach chemistry the liberal arts college it wasn't to be high powered i was going to do too much research but teaching which i i love and i was going to my classical music program on the local public radio station which is right next to the chemistry building and i was going to watch my kids play baseball i would have preferred that they play cricket  but they don't do much of that up in northern new york and then one day the the college librarian said to me you're a chemist what's the issue of incineration and i spent  i joined the campaign to fight the building of this trash incinerator in our county st lawrence county and that little journey the spread has been seven twenty eight years on that journey fighting incineration and it's taken me to forty nine states in the u s seven provinces in canada and sixty other countries and this effort twenty eight years of my life is just now available between two covers on that whole issue it's it's it's more from being opposed to something the campaign of no to the campaign of yes say yes to zero waste the subtitle on trashing the planet one community at a time and i'm delighted to say that jeremy irons who starred in this movie trashed has written the forward to this book that was an exciting moment now i say all of that just to give you an inkling that when my wife eighteen years ago asked me to read some papers which she put on my desk and when she told me what it was it was a bunch of papers on fluoridation i said take those away these people are crazy at that time i did not want a third issue i was trying to balance going around the world helping  communities with incineration and so on i was taking nearly every weekend nearly every holiday every break i didn't want a third issue and i certainly didn't want to third issue that was stigmatized me as loony tunes and so when i started to read the literature on thursday sion it was with one intention as quickly as possible to get my wife off my back and convince her that these people were truly crazy chemistry physics and biology and they really made this book they got the tone right essentially i got a draft of the whole thing but they got it right they changed the tone not they we understated not overstated and everything was backed up with eighty pages of references to the scientific literature and i and my nave ity had hoped in two thousand and ten when this was published that it would raise the level of debate that independent people and scientists doctors dentists and others would read this and see that we weren't a bunch of loony tunes that we made the arguments completely transparent everything's documented but sad to say after over three years there's not been not one single written critique of this book and maybe the most depressing example of this is that shortly after it was published i gave a presentation to the ministry of health in wellington new zealand about twenty people there were to much to our surprise we were expecting two or three but twenty people showed up so they've clearly interested and i went through the whole book about what was in the book at the end i said to them i said look we as three opponents of fluoridation three scientists opposed to production have done everything that you could expect from people that opposed to something we've documented the whole case we've articulated it and and everything is backed up with these references to the scientific literature i said we've done our job now this is your policy this is your program i want you to get some of your bureaucrats your experts to read this and come back with a a critique of it and if you can't do that you should stop promoting it in new zealand nothing nothing in three years and yet the minister of health went on television in new zealand complaining about the opponents of fluoridation misrepresenting the