COLGATE AD:

“COLGATE TOTAL^® TOOTHPASTE WITH TRICLOSAN: THE #1 TRUSTED CHOICE OF DENTAL PROFESSIONALS.”

“Colgate Total^® has been the trusted choice for healthy teeth and gums for more than 15 years. It’s the brand used and recommended most by dentists and hygienists…

But the Food and Drug Administration REDACTED negative elements from a toxicology report because it ‘came from a third party’ and that meant  the FDA was “within its rights”.

New York-based Colgate has not been accused of wrongdoing, and “The 35 pages don’t prove triclosan is harmful.

“It was the FDA’s decision to keep the documents off of its website,” Colgate said.

The FDA followed standard procedure “by redacting information that had come from a third party”, said spokeswoman Andrea Fischer.

Some studies were done in the Ciba-Geigy labs, the first triclosan maker and a predecessor to its current primary maker, German BASF SE, according to the documents.

The pages didn’t denote which studies were done by an outside party, or who the party was.

Fischer declined to identify them.

BLOOMBERG said, “The chemical triclosan has been linked to cancer- cell growth and disrupted development in animals.

“Regulators are reviewing whether it’s safe to put in soap, cutting boards and toys. Consumer companies are phasing it out. Minnesota voted in May to ban it in many products.

“At the same time, millions of Americans are putting it in their mouths every day, by way of a top-selling toothpaste that uses the antibacterial chemical to head off gum disease – Colgate-Palmolive Co.’s Total.”

“Total is safe,” Colgate says, citing the rigorous Food and Drug Administration process that led to the toothpaste’s 1997 approval as an over-the-counter drug.

[But] “A closer look at that application process, however, reveals that some of the scientific findings Colgate put forward to establish triclosan’s safety in toothpaste weren’t black and white — and weren’t, until this year, available to the public.

 

“Colgate’s Total application included 35 pages summarizing toxicology studies on triclosan, which the FDA withheld from view. The agency released the pages earlier this year in response to a lawsuit over a Freedom of Information Act request.

Later, following inquiries from Bloomberg News, the FDA put the pages on its website, including this summary;

“Clearly the results of this trial indicate that under exaggerated dosing conditions, in using large doses, more frequently than recommended by the American Dental Association, with swallowing of the toopaste and the resulting rinses from the brush, the ratio between the amount absorbed in man under these conditions, relative to the No Effect Level in mice is, under a worst case scenario equal to 22.5 which is in excess of the minimum allowable 25:1 ratio.

“Using a more reasonable median absorption approach the resulting ratio was 53.5:1, more than double the allowed ratio. Given that the dosing conditions which produced these conditions is very unrealistic, it is most likely that the true ratio in the general population will be much higher.” 

Full article here