17 Oct 2014

Water fluoridation is known to harm racial minorities most


Water fluoridation is known to harm ethnic minorities the most

It has been discovered that Government health authorities in the USA knew over 50 years ago that black Americans and Hispanics suffered greater harm from fluoridation, yet failed to warn the community about their disproportionate risk, according to documents obtained by the international Fluoride Action Network (FAN).

In 1945, Grand Rapids, Michigan, experimentally added fluoride chemicals into the water supply to see if children’s tooth decay would decline without causing fluoride’s unwanted toxic effects – dental fluorosis (white spotted, yellow, brown and/or pitted teeth). Prior to Grand Rapids, government fluorosis studies focused exclusively on white children. But little publicized results from Grand Rapids showed that black children were more susceptible to fluorosis than whites. A January 10, 1962 internal memorandum, from a U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) official, F.J. Maier, revealed that “negroes in Grand Rapids had twice as much fluorosis than others.”

Government officials have taken no steps to educate the ethnic minority communities about their heightened fluoridation risk.

A FAN team led by attorney Michael Connett uncovered the 1962 memorandum and a trove of other soon-to-be released documents that shed light on how political pressures have stymied open discussion from government and industrial authorities on the hazards of fluoride.

In 2005, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) acknowledged for the first time that the black community has higher rates of dental fluorosis. It took a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, however, to learn the full extent of this disparity. According to recently released FOIA documents, 58% of black children were diagnosed with dental fluorosis in CDC’s 1999-2004 national survey, versus 36% of white children.

“The epidemic of fluorosis now seen in ethnic minority groups in the USA and the UK in fluoridated areas,” says John Spottiswoode, Chairman of Hampshire Against Fluoridation, “is the visible legacy of both these governments’ failure to act on what they knew.”

When the authorities first endorsed fluoridation in the early 1950s, they estimated that the “safe level” of fluoride is exceeded when “more than 10 to 15 percent of children” have “the mildest” type of fluorosis. In fluoridated areas of the UK this figure is 48 percent of children according to the government’s own York Review figures, with 12.5% of children needing expensive treatment due to excessive fluoride in their teeth, and therefore also in their bodies.

Not only are fluorosis and cavity rates higher in the ethnic minority communities, but so too are various health conditions, such as diabetes and kidney disease, that greatly increase susceptibility to fluoride’s extremely serious harmful effects.

Because of this, a number of top civil rights advocates have begun calling for an end to fluoridation, including former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, the Reverend Dr. Gerald Durley, the Reverend Bernice King (daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King), and LULAC (the largest Hispanic civil rights organization in the USA).

“Dental fluorosis is only the most obvious effect of fluoride, because you can see in your teeth that you have fluoride poisoning,” says Spottiswoode.

Fluoride is also an “endocrine disrupter” that can affect thyroid function according to a 2006 report from the National Research Council, and a neurotoxin that can damage a child’s developing brain, according to a 2014 paper in The Lancet.

John Spottiswoode continued: “This American information has major implications for the Southampton water fluoridation proposal. There are a lot of ethnic minority people in Southampton and we now know that these groups can be expected to suffer more damage from fluoride, disadvantaging minority groups further. Skeletons keep on falling out of the water fluoridation science cupboard clearly showing again and again that fluoridation is unsafe, ineffective as well as unethical. The authorities really must say now that the water fluoridation proposal is dead in the water.”

Ends.

For more information please contact:
John Spottiswoode, Hampshire Against Fluoridation
14 Evelyn Crescent, Southampton, SO15 5JE
Email: john.spottiswoode@btinternet.com

or by telephone 02380 789230, mobile: 07794 382673

References:
1. The York Review can be seen at http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/fluorid.htm and www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/fluoridnew.htm
2. More about Racial Disparities in Dental Fluorosis
http://fluoridealert.org/studies/dental_fluorosis02/


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