the other day i was driving and i heard garrison keillor on the radio in the morning he does this lovely thing with the poetry in the morning and he gave a quote from henrik ibsen who wrote enemy of the people which you should read if you haven't read that you're interesting for a day she says definitely read them but he gave a quote from ghosts it's not only what we have inherited from our father a mother that walks in us of dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs and so forth they have no vitality but they cling to us all the same and we cannot shake them off whenever i take up a newspaper i seem to see ghosts delighting between the lines there must be ghosts all the country over as fixed as the signs of the sea and then we are one and all of the light because they want to hang on to this fossilized belief system that fluoridation actually works and it's good for us so with that as preamble should obsolete estimating a safe dose of fluoride to protect children from lowered i q and lastly how can we end fluoridation before simple facts and one one single biological bio chemical reaction in the human body needs fluoride it's not an essential nutrients sometimes the other side will say that but it is not and they have no evidence to but we know that florida and its and sometimes switches on g proteins does all kinds of things it's not something that you want in your body if you can possibly avoid it the single most important fact for me was this one how extremely low the level of fluoride is in mother's milk point zero zero four parts a million now the other side sometimes says  everywhere it's in all the water supply it sits in the sea yes yes don't you realize then what a stupid thing this is because nature has told you that the baby does not need fluoride are you telling me after millions of years of evolution that every pregnant woman every mother in the world has an inadequate supply of fluoride for a baby that somehow th nature has screwed up on baby's first meal i do not believe it and i do not believe that a bunch of dentists in chicago knows more about what the baby needs than mother nature herself you know i actually gave  somebody the chief health officer of victoria in australia i said tell me dr hill i think it's hill dr hill if freud was good for the baby it was important for the baby's development teeth or anything why is it so low in mother's milk you know what he said so mother nature has dealt some children a r what this means of course in practical terms is that a bottle fed baby in a florida community like seattle is getting between one hundred seventy five and three hundred times the floor i dos that nature they had no idea but from what freud would do to the babies broner the babies brains of babies and consistent no idea at all and yet they went ahead that's a huge reckless gamble the government has the audacity to give us this legacy the legacy of this practice for every single one of you here is a life long up to this point a lifelong accumulation of fluoride in your bones and they really don't know again it's another gamble they really don't know with the levels of floor it in your bones are going to reach the levels which they do in india and china and cause haro bull symptoms the first symptoms of freud's poisoning of the bones is just like after itis stiffness of the joints pains in the joints pains in the bones and as it accumulates still further the bones get harder and more and we still don't have anybody in the united states who said seventy eighty ninety years of this fluorite accumulating in their bones what they what we know is that forty to sixty percent of the fluoride is excrete hit by the kidney each day but the rest accumulates in our bones and is steadily increasing over a lifetime to realize ation is simple we should never use the public water supply to deliver medical treatment we've never done it with any other substance nutrient mineral medicine we've never used the public water supply to as a delivery system for these things why because once you put in the water you can control the dose effectively essential everybody knows that every time you go to the doctor you get a prescription what do they tell you take three tablets a day or whatever secondly you can't control who gets the medicine is totally indiscriminate it goes to people with poor diet with poor health it goes to babies goes to the very old it goes to people that already have compromised because they got low intake or they got poor kidney function because everybody completely indiscriminate once you put in the water it violates the individual's right to inform consent to medication on their foot call an ethical this is well established go to the web page of the american medical association and read about what informed consent requires and what is happening is that seattle right now is doing to every citizen in seattle what a doctor in seattle could do to no individual patient say i've got some real good stuff in here drink it is going to be good for you and you say doctor i don't really want to do that you say you do it i'm telling you you should do it if you put any pressure on the patient to take that he could lose his license so she could lose her license absolutely preposterous it's so many things opera posterous about this and when you get i possibly believe that the center of disease control the american medical association the american dental association the world health organization all the professional bodies in american public health association have they all got this wrong it's preposterous yeah i hope i can convince you at the end i'm not the proposed this one what's been going on for sixty eight years in this country is proposed to us and what's more it's a massive betrayal of according to world health organization tooth decay in twelve year olds is coming down as fast in florida countries as non florida countries so here is too thick a then coming down from in this case of seventies to the two thousand  countries which are known for dated and the tooth decay is coming down just as fast if not fast a better strategy most most of the tooth decay is concentrated in low income families eighty percent of the tooth decay in the united states occurs in about twenty percent of the population and this is the population of low income families so they're right to target these families they've just got the wrong strategy now we need to target those families with better dental education and better diets and they do not need to swallow a substance that could put them in greater disadvantage makes much more sense to provide topical treatments either in the form of fluoride vanishes or in the form of simply brushing for david to paste simple stuff better still i would encourage so it's a nice bacteria side if you like because it hurts them but doesn't hurt us it's been used successfully and in scandinavia in japan for many many many years so the the in wichita kansas right now they're experimenting giving children xyloto mints one in the morning one in the afternoon specifically targeting schools in low income areas and it's working now in scotland scotland cannot but the scottish government opted in two thousand and five a dental plan called the child smile program and what they doing in this program is school based toothbrushing schemes they teach kids how to brush their teeth in nursery schools they are offering healthy snacks and drinks to the children they are giving oral health advice to children and families on healthy weaning teething and toothbrushing annual checkups and treatment if required and then finally for a ride vanish applications this is all from the scottish government the proportion of children age four to six without obvious dental decay has risen from forty two point three percent in one thousand nine hundred six to sixty seven percent in two thousand and twelve and this is attributed to toothbrushing those early lessons the proportion of children aged ten to twelve without obvious dental decay rose from fifty two point nine percent in two thousand and five to sixty nine point four percent two thousand and eleven and seventy two point eight percent in two thousand and thirteen there are way ahead of their target target was like a seventy percent there were there over that already and this is a very simple very elegant program and we're talking now low income kids in places like glasgow glasgow researches found that the scheme had reduced the cost of treating dental disease in five year olds by more than half between two thousand and one and two thousand and ten this is just one country in europe most of europe is not for it before they spend another penny of money to promote this practice we're talking about the center of disease control that gets me spends millions of taxpayers dollars each year promoting this practice they should take a fraction of that money go to europe and find what they're doing to in europe to fight tooth decay successfully without forcing fluoride in everybody's drinking water that would be a good use of taxpayers money in short our kids need more brushing more fruit and vegetables lish sugar less sugar means less tooth decay and less obesity less obesity means less diabetes fewer heart attacks in other words education to promote less sugar is very good investment you know you put the two campaigns together fight to decay fight obesity in the same stroke yank those soft drinks out of schools and do everything we can to educate parents to cut down on the the sugar crap that they get all day long we name education not for relation to fight tooth decay and obesity part three the events that have made fluoridation obsolete there quite a number of them some more serious than event one but starting in one thousand nine hundred two appeared in a number of leading journals like science and nature articles which indicated that tooth decay was no different looked at thirty nine thousand children in eighty four communities and it was finally published in one nine hundred ninety by bruno l and carlos both of who worked for the and idea and what they did is that they look decayed missing and filled permanent two surfaces a measure which we call d m f s in the study they found on average for children five to seventeen the average tooth four take two point eight from three point four and you got point six so the saving that they found in this massive study cost the taxpayers ninety four million dollars to do this massive search survey all they could come up with was a saving of point six of one to surface in a child's mouth out of one hundred twenty eight two surfaces that's what all the anxious about when we start to hear about  this and see where the you think saving on average point six of a tooth surface could possibly justify some of the risk i'm going to be talking about but i should add one more thing not only is this point six in my view miserably small but it wasn't even shown to be statistically significant and catherine tese in a couple of years ago looked at the statistics and found it wasn't statistically significant incredible now that was a u s government funded study and this is another u s government study the first one was one of the biggest studies this second one is a small study but very precise this is part of the iowa they've been tracking children from birth following a whole bunch of parameters on children from birth and they decided to use the data here to calculate what was the level of fluoride that a kid needed to swallow in order to reduce tooth decay so in this study what they did was for each child on an individual basis calculate estimate how much fluoride they were taking in each day ingesting each day from toothpaste for dated water from food based upon the levels of for it in the city and what they found was no clear relationship no clear relationship between the amount of fluoride that the kids were swallowing and tooth decay and their own words these findings suggest that achieving a carious free status may have relatively little to do with fluoride intake that again should have shaken the faith of those who promote for redemption but it's just gone by like everything else which is the gold standard for epidemiology to demonstrate effectiveness not being done incredibly when you think of all the millions a mans of taxpayers dollars bit of being spent on this and all those  exactly except for the amount of fluoride they're getting in the water is practically impossible to control for all these variables is so many variables which affect  the evidence is pretty weak now the second event probably explains all everything i've said up to this point on event one those studies which didn't find a difference in florida known for david the world hundred ninety nine the center of disease control the big promoter for addition in the united states conceded that the predominant benefit of fluoride was topical not systemic and let's have a look at the exact quote so that you know what we're looking at here this is the big promoter of in the center of disease control oral health division florence carey's preventive properties initially were attributed to changes in enamel during two development this is why pediatricians gave fluoride tablets to pregnant women this is why they gave drops to babies all in the hope that the fluoride in the enamel will build up in the teeth under the guns so that when they erupted into the oral cavity they would be more resistant to acid attack from the bacteria breaking down that was the mechanism that was believed for fifty years and then they said whoops we're sorry laboratory an epidemiological research suggests that fluoride prevents dental caries predominantly  eruption of the into the mouth and it's actions primarily topical now if floyd works primarily on the outside of the tooth and not from inside the body why swallow fluoride  expose every tissue of the body to a toxic substance when you can brush it on your teeth and spit it out if you want it i don't know if you did brush and teeth and spit it out this way you not only protect yourself against floyd's toxic effects but you also soviet's a cool problem because if you use that as your strategy then you're not forcing it on people that don't want it which is so unacceptable to many  people there are a large number of people out there is it i don't care for it works i don't care if it's dangerous i don't want the government telling me that i have to put this substance in my body but i don't want to put it in my body that year review of the remarkable thing about this review was that the panel chosen to look at the toxicology of fluoride in water and examine e p a s safe drinking water standards was the first balance get this report out in one year but it took them three is there it is florida drinking water a scientific review of e p a standards you can get this online and search it for free they showed in this review and they studies and what they found is that fluoride causes many health problems that's not the argument the argument is whether fluoridation causes any health problems or the way i'd like to frame it is this is there an adequate margin of safety from the levels which we know coursing in india and china and other places with high natural levels is there an etiquette magine the margin of safety to protect not the average person but all the citizens from that effect drinking for it it was that was the key question they did not address that in this report they just of point six to one point one milligrams per liter with that having been said they completely ignore the five hundred pages of this report incredible these statements by s c d c and n h and m r c indicate three things one they don't know the difference between concentration and dose it's a self serving argument which they use again the studies at the levels of florida drinking water in australia in new zealand in ireland in canada in the united states so that in itself is a self fulfilling prophecy they know they don't have many epidemiological studies but this confusing of concentration and dose is in excusable because if you had two populations one drinking one part per million and one drinking two parts per million even four parts  overlap the doses by experience by these some of the individuals in these two populations in other words the high water consumer at the one part per million will be getting a higher dose in milligrams per day than a low water consumer in the higher concentration and so to dismiss this on the basis of comparing concentrations is self serving scientific poppyco they have little notion of the basics of regulatory toxicology you can't simply just declare a safety before you've done a careful risk assessment to calculate where the you've got an adequate margin of safety and i will be doing that a little bit later on the i q studies they didn't do that no no risk assessment was performed by either of these any of these three agents and third two in that review was an exposure analysis where they carefully calculated how much the kids and of all people in the population were getting exposed to fluoride and what they concluded the  this is not relevant to water for days when these people have shown that some people are getting more than their recommended safe reference toasts the point zero six milligrams of freud per kilogram body weight per day and for those who can't read there's a little direction here's the diagram on the bottom axis there are different age ranges going across and there is the line the red line is the reference to  safe reference dose dosage the thing i've circled is bottle fed infants bottle at parent inputs are getting way over there the safe reference  flora how can you say that this is not relevant to so i put to use these statements from the a t f c d c and h m r c a political not scientific statements they are more intent on protecting the fluoridation program than they are protecting our children our residents our citizens they are working backwards when ever any evidence comes through that there's a problem then they junk that evidence they're working backwards because this program for some reason is more important to them than telling the truth informing the public protecting our health the propaganda used by public health officials this is the thing which upsets me more than anything i see absolutely no justification for a civil servant somebody who's paid by the taxpayer to spin message or even lie to the public that's just unacceptable there there are public relations agencies which will do that for any organization any industry but it shouldn't start with the civil servants maybe the politicians can spin and message they are in charge of policy but they should be fed accurate object if information and that is not happening with the public health service in this country and public health agencies in the various for dating countries around the world  early promoters of fertilization made it quite clear that a one part per million ten percent of the kids would have very mild dental fluorosis what does that look like ten percent they said this wouldn't be recognized by anybody but a dentist this is the one extreme range of dental cirrhosis that the worst of very miles ok but at the other end what you would see a white cusps on the edge of the of the take this symmetrical and ok so that's what they thought the ten percent of kids would have this or something like it and that was justified but this was the tradeoff for reducing the kids tooth decay so what did the c d c report in two thousand and ten they reported that forty one percent of all american children that's both living in florida known for it in communities had dental forensics and not all of it in the very mild you see the very mild there twenty eight point five percent not ten percent twenty eight point five percent but look at that eight point six percent maro mild is up to fifty percent of the enamel impacted on the affected teen and moderate or severe three point six percent that's one hundred percent of the impact we could argue about whether this is a health effect where it's whether it causes psychological damage for kids who don't want to go on a date that you want their partner to potential date to see th discussion but i don't want to go there i want to go to this which to me is the key question when freud is damaging the baby's growing to cells causing this condition dental for us this is by a biochemical mechanism this is an internal mechanism it is a systemic effect not like the benefit which is largely topical this is a comes from inside the body what's it doing to other developing tissues and that's a question that was not addressed comprehensively satisfactory before all these professional bodies following in her master's footsteps the us public health service unt so event five since nine hundred ninety one extensive evidence has emerged that florid freud damages the brains of of animals and humans and i do mean extensive there's a huge weight of evidence on our side which is not counteracted by the proponents over forty animal studies shows that freud demonstrates animal brain nineteen animal studies shows that fluoride interferes with the animal learning ability memory they dosed the animals fluoride in show they perform less well in mazes and you know the little tots they set animals well established twelve studies which shows neuro behavioral deficits three human studies which shows of freud damages the fetal brain and last thirty eight out of forty four published studies indicate the freud lowest is associated with lowering  and then jang and i'm particularly fond of this i q studies because jang controlled for a lot of those confounding variables which they claim he didn't but he did and i'm interested because i went to the villages in china where the studies took place these villages were had a very stable population stable population for hundreds of years the same occupations rural farmers same housing conditions same diet same lifestyle same and the estimated threshold at which this learning occurs is one point eight parts per million according to jack one point eight pounds from now the harvard review many of these studies have been published in out of the way chinese journals fan has spent a lot of money getting many of these i q studies translated they used some of our translations and some of the others have been published in the journal fluoride which they completely ignore but anyway choice and grand chain and a couple of others did a measure analysis in twenty seven of these studies they could do that because the methodology was more or less the same comparing the i q of children in the high right village with the low for village in a couple of cases it was from a ride from coal burning but in most of the cases it was from floyd in the water the study was published in environmental health perspective says one of the leading environmental health journals in the world they acknowledge what nearly everybody has said about the study says that they we would all like more information about but nevertheless what they also concluded that the results these were done in different parts of china india mexico and iran so many different places these were done and out of those twenty seven studies twenty six of them found the same result a learning of i q in the high for right the age it's remarkable to get such consistency in something where the studies are distributed over a large geographical area and the average lowering of i q at these twenty six studies was seven i q points which is substantial as you'll see in a moment now the promoters claim that you can ignore these studies because the concentrations used in the high freud villages were too high concentration remember the same thing again comparing concentrations not bothering to calculate the dose but comparing concentrations as to the very high a most of the proponents have referred to two of the studies which were as high as eleven p really does not give you an adequate margin of safety to protect all our kids drinking water between point seven and one point two which i should demonstrate in a moment but as i've already stressed comparing concentrations is simplistic and self serving what is needed is a margin of safety analysis which i should now do now the goal is to estimate a safe dose of floyd which we could confidently predict based upon the would protect all children in a large population from a lowered i q this is a standard procedure that the e p a has to do for whatever is looking at the toxicity of a substance and protecting the population remember not to protect the average person but protect the most vulnerable the overall goal is to find what we call the no observable adverse effect level and divide by a margin of safety to tend to protect the whole population here are five of the studies in the choice review this is their table or part of it and these were all statistically significant you can see all the drops of i q there and those are the levels of fluoride in the high floor and village one point eight two two point nine two point five two point three eight now to be conservative we will deal with the lowest of those villages which was one point eight but that's a concentration milligrams per liter we've got to calculate a dose where we don't know what the dose is so the best we can do is to calculate a range let's make some and that's point nine to three point six again we have to be conservative let's take the lowest end of that range and say this is our lowest observable adverse effect level  point nine milligrams per day however if you don't have the know well which is what we're aiming for we've got to divide that by ten so you divide the low well by ten to get to the know well and protect the whole population including the most vulnerable we divide them now well by ten and now are safe level to protect all our kids from having a lowered i q is point zero zero nine milligrams per day let's calculate how much water a kid could drink then one part per million if the safe dose is point zero zero nine milligrams per day it's he she could only drink point zero zero nine liters a day which is nine million liters which is two teaspoons of water in other words if that study in china one point eight parts a million is a valid study normal procedures would say that a kid in the united states shouldn't drink more than two teaspoons of  of you might be concerned about all these safety factors believe you me that's what they use but let's lift one of the safety factors if we drop one safety factor of ten children of water that's less than a liter so any way you cut it once you've got these studies showing learning of i q these concentrations there is no margin of safety to protect all our kids from having their mental development impaired by drinking florida in the water and that's particularly true of bottle fed infants at the very beginning when their brains are developing the last time the last time that they should be exposed to fluoride and by the way could take this of little step further and calculate the the dose that a bottle fed baby would get an a and a breast fed baby would get and what comes out based upon these same numbers is that a breastfed baby is just about at the safe level so mother's milk protects our babies from fluoride so if you do tap but of course will if you're a low income family you can't afford that so when they say that we go to florida eight for low income families poll only the babies that you least want to get flor water babies from low income families they're already have many strikes against them they probably already have potentially lowered i q for all kinds of reasons but published a study which shows that the lowest i q relates to the plasma flow right now is 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 children's i q as the fluoride levels in the serum goes up so it's these measures of individual exposure which further strengthen our conclusions here now there's a lot for 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 value 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 fraction of the total area under that curve that's the fraction of kids in any population which is going to be very bright going to be genius level ok when you get to geniuses maybe i need to push you down a little bit  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 hard as 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 don't have the number of geniuses in your society you have the potential to get you and your gates and people like that and you also double the number of children that are gonna 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 with them 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 deliberately adding to the drinking water how much do you need before you turn off the tap how much more information do you need than two or three hundred animal and off that tap where other doctors in this country where are the people in education in this country where the public health authorities in this country 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 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 sharpen the nail to affect change you need t hammer of public opinion that's the teamwork here i am people like bill osman some and other experts we can sharpen 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 umpteen copies and get it to everybody that you can think of especially your dentists and doctors there's my son made this one ten facts on friday 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 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 edition 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 a day should not to make money not to get power they come to the meetings they working their tails off you asked and 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 asian as there's little difference from what i see this and it's exciting but seeing visible all i see here but most of you do not see it most of you see this as a marginalized group struggling battering your heads against the local brick walls and the local councils except your the local health department you see it is an impossible 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 prohibition together and for one alliance that alliance is the world wide 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 got to do we each of our communities we are vastly outnumbered around the world we have a for medical number of people supported by for medical amount of of scientific intelligence but the world  we've got a lot of education to do that's it