EPA Scientists Oppose Fluoridation

“I’ve never seen scientific evidence discounted and refused to be looked at the way they’re doing with fluoride.” —Jacqueline Warren, National Resources Defense Council

In this age of repression on genuine scientific research, we need to take note that scientists free to do open and honest research, and report on it, have often taken stands that dispute their agencies’ officials stances. Nowhere has that been more true than in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the issue of fluoride. Rank and file EPA scientists have strongly opposed water fluoridation.

EPA scientists protected by the National Treasury Employees Union were approached by an employee in 1985. His concern was that he was:

…being forced to write into the regulation a statement to the effect that EPA thought it was alright for children to have “funky” teeth. It was OK, EPA said, because it considered that condition to be only a cosmetic effect, not an adverse health effect. The reason for this EPA position was that it was under political pressure to set its health-based standard for fluoride at 4 mg/liter. At that level, EPA knew that a significant number of children develop moderate to severe dental fluorosis, but since it had deemed the effect as only cosmetic, EPA didn’t have to set its health-based standard at a lower level to prevent it.⁽¹⁾

A statement issued by EPA scientists stated that they tried to “settle this ethics issue quietly, within the family, but EPA was unable or unwilling to resist external political pressure.” Therefore, they went public with it and filed an amicus curiae brief supporting a public interest group’s suit against the EPA. In their statement, from which the above quote was extracted, the scientists avered that their opposition to fluoridation only grew stronger after that incident.

Studies Showing Fluoride Lowers Intelligence

That article goes on to document research by Phyllis Mullenix, PhD, who had established the Department of Toxicology at the Forsyth Dental Research Institute. She was also involved with a research program at Harvard’s Department of Neuropathology and Psychiatry. That research documented significant neurotoxic effects of fluoride.

Dr. Mullenix described going to a conference of the National Institute of Dental Research, a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to present her findings and realizing, on walking in, that she was in hostile territory. The entry areas were filled with propaganda declaring “The Miracle of Fluoride”. Of her experience at that conference, she stated:

The fluoride pattern of behavioral problems matches up with the same results of administering radiation and chemotherapy [to cancer patients]. All of these really nasty treatments that are used clinically in cancer therapy are well known to cause I.Q. deficits in children. That’s one of the best studied effects they know of. The behavioral pattern that results from the use of fluoride matches that produced by cancer treatment that causes a reduction in intelligence.⁽²⁾

On meeting with dental industry representatives afterwards, she was asked if she’d been saying that fluoride lowers children’s IQ. She says, “And I told them, ‘basically, yes.’”⁽²⁾

That was the end of her career. She was fired…

The article continues…