The dark side of fluoride explored

Dr Robert C Dickson

In both Canada and Australia, pro-fluoridation advocates have had a field day, citing claims that seemingly support their position to fluoridate water. Many of those claims are misleading or erroneous and incorrect.

In the early to mid 1900s, dentists noticed several communities where people, and particularly children, had white and brown staining on their teeth and fewer cavities. Their water contained natural calcium fluoride, which is ubiquitous in the Earth’s crust. They concluded fluoride must be good for teeth.

Fast forward to WWII and the Manhattan Project. Large quantities of fluorine were essential to produce atomic weapons. Yet workers in these facilities, and plants and animals around them, were doing poorly, some even dying.

This created an unusual liaison between the military, medical and dental establishment, and the industries saddled with disposing of their highly toxic and regulated by-product, hydrofluosilicic acid (HFSA).

Their solution was to enlist the master spin doctor of the 20th century, Edward Bernays, whom the tobacco companies had hired prior to the war to convince women that smoking was good for them.

Within a very short time, studies were set up and cherry picked, and doctors and dentists bought into the new wave of ‘science’ – fluoride is good for kids! The sacred cow of water fluoridation was born.

The chemistry

There are essentially three types of fluoride: natural calcium fluoride, found in much of our rock and rivers and in most of the Earth’s crust; pharmaceutical-grade sodium fluoride that is in most toothpastes, fluoride rinses, prescriptions, and dental office treatments; and HFSA, the highly toxic waste product scrubbed out of industry stacks in the southern US, China and other parts of the world along with traces of lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic and other highly unsavoury and harmful toxins.

It is HFSA that is used to fluoridate water in virtually all jurisdictions in Australia, Canada, the US and NZ.

This is a huge boon to industry which, instead of paying dearly to dispose of this toxic by-product, now sells it to municipalities to dispose of in our water supply. It therefore ends up in our bodies, or flows unchecked into the environment after washing our cars and flushing our toilets – where it was not allowed originally by strict law.

The significance here is that natural calcium fluoride is tightly bound and therefore much less is released when ingested into the human body, whereas HFSA, which is ionised immediately, is absorbed quickly and easily in the gut, and crosses the blood-brain barrier, the placental barrier, and has access to virtually every cell, organ and system in the human body.

Ethics and morality

According to the United Nations, everyone has the right to clean, unmedicated water. Forcing mass medication on entire populations, without informed consent, and without monitoring, checking its levels in the human body, or studying short- or long-term effects, is the epitome of poor, unethical and unprofessional medicine.

Fluoride is a medication according to major health bodies worldwide, and strict control is required in dental offices and through physician prescriptions. And yet the collusion of industry and health associations, backed by huge corporations, has bypassed these checks and balances.

Health associations and organisations patronisingly attempt to assuage public concern by repeating their mantra of safety as they control concentrations of fluoride in our water.

These advocates never address the fact that dose, the amount of a drug consumed, and dosage, the amount of drug per kilogram of body weight, have little to do with concentration.

Therefore a 50kg woman who runs marathons and drinks ten glasses of fluoridated water daily gets ten times the dose as a sedentary office worker drinking only one glass per day.

No consent, no control of dose or dosage, no monitoring or follow-up – highly unethical in every sense and meaning of the word.

Where we are now

Byron Shire remains one of the few bastions of common sense and protectors of human rights in this country, as much of Australia has submitted to mass artificial water fluoridation.

Dentists, public health officials and many politicians, none of whom are toxicologists, continue to push for fluoridation when more than 97 per cent of communities in Europe, British Columbia and Quebec in Canada have eliminated this antiquated practice.

In fact, more than 5,000 professionals worldwide have had the courage to publicly call for an end to fluoridation and, of special note, less than six per cent of the world is fluoridated.

Interesting that Labor health critic Walt Secord speaks of  ‘a tiny group of conspiracy theorists’. We wonder if he also includes the 14 Nobel laureates in Medicine who are strongly opposed to this mass medication?

Well-intentioned fluoridation proponents such as Mr Secord say they’re helping children and the poor. Ironically, it’s infants, children, the underprivileged, the chronically ill, elderly and people of colour who are most susceptible to harm from, and the side effects of, fluoridation.

Medical error

Medical science has historically and frequently made errors. Medical and dental associations have endorsed smoking, asbestos, lead, BPA, mercury, thalidomide, Vioxx and many other dangerous products.

Just as they were wrong then, they’re wrong again, despite Mr Secord’s insinuation that it is ‘mind boggling that any group would oppose water fluoridation’. Indeed, it is beyond reason and common sense that more groups don’t, or won’t, oppose this enforced mass medication.

Fluoride, after all, is not necessary for any body function, unlike calcium, vitamins B and D, or iodine, which are essential to health; or chlorination, which kills organisms before they reach our bodies.Artificial water fluoridation is not safe, ethical or effective.

♦ Robert C Dickson, MD, CCFP, FCFP, is a community physician in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and is the founder of Safe Water Calgary (www.safewatercalgary.com).