First of all, I would like to thank Paul Connett for his enlightening email to me regarding what questions to ask the Health Department when fighting fluoride in your water. I have posted his email here so anyone doing battle to get fluoride taken out of their water can use these questions to force action in their local area.

Second of all, I encourage people in any area that fluoridates to begin a Class Action Suit against any municipal water systems that fluoridate your water. There is enough study now
that you can prove health reactions and to show there is enough evidence and action by
the medical and environmental communities that the matter of fluoride poisoning can be taken
as negligent - or even intentional! Fight hard - or die.

Remember - Fluoride is a danger to the environment as well as to our health. If you don’t have local action against this problem - now is the time to fight against willfull and intentional poisoning.

FLUORIDE ACTION NETWORK
http://www.FluorideAlert.org

FAN Bulletin 936: Questions for State Health Departments

February 28, 2008

Dear Sally,

I am sure that most of you are now aware that state health department policies are
determined centrally. The US Public Health Service (US PHS) is a uniformed branch of
government.

The Chain of Command

The titular head of the US PHS is the US Surgeon General. Policy is determined from
the top and sent down to the State Health Departments for deployment just like the
military. If you are in this bureaucratic chain of command, you do not challenge
policy without risking your job and/or your pension. In the case of fluoridation
this policy is orchestrated by the Oral Health Division at the CDC (one division of
one arm of the US PHS) and has been determined to be “safe and effective” with
little scientific documentation that this is the case. State health departments
throughout the 50 states promote this practice faithful to the chain of command.
Indeed, most states have within their health departments a dental health director
whose main role is to keep pushing this practice. Their job is to promote and
defend and not to question. For example, many simply parrot the CDC claim that the
NRC (2006) review is consistent with their promotion of fluoridation at 1 ppm!

The MPH

Many public health professionals prior to entry into the Public Health Service are
prepared for this chain of command when they obtain a Masters degree, entitled
Masters in Public Health (MPH). After what Dr. Bill Osmunson told me about his MPH
training I shudder when I see those three letters. He said that when he got into an
argument/discussion with his Professor on a medical issue, he was told, “Our job is
not to question the science underpinning a practice but to promote it.” Bill says
that if he had not been only 5 weeks from graduation he would have left the class
there and then.

On Tuesday I came up with a way of trying to expose the robotic thinking ? and I did
it in Vermont, a state which is famous for its “free thinking.”

Randolph, Vermont.

I was invited down to Randolph by a local farmer, Stuart Skrill, to present the
arguments against fluoridation to the City Council. Two years ago citizens voted in
an advisory referendum to stop fluoridating their water, but nothing has been done
by the Council to follow up on this. Stuart forced the issue and that is why on
Tuesday February 26, in the middle of a heavy snowstorm, I found myself providing
testimony at a public information meeting held at the local hospital. The council
invited a local pediatrician and the State Health Department to present the case for
fluoridation and myself the case against. Because of the storm neither the
pediatrician nor the State Health Department person was able to attend. However, two
dentists stepped in and provided the pro-position.

At the end of my presentation I summarized my talk by issuing a series of questions
to the Vermont Department of Health., which I have printed out below. It occurs to
me that with suitable name changes, others might submit the same questions to their
State Health Departments. I am sure it will not force them to change their minds ?
or break away from the chain of command ? but it might open the eyes of citizens and
local officials to what is going on. In the “Land of the Free” there is little free
thinking on Public Health policies at the State level.

Parrots in action.

If you visit our Latest News section on the home page you will see that many new
fluoridation schemes are being proposed, including a renewed attempt to fluoridate
Hawaii; an attempt to expand mandatory fluoridation in Nebraska; a continued effort
to fluoridate the UK; and an attempt to fluoridate another community in Quebec, even
while the provincial capital, Quebec City, has announced that it will stop the
practice in April. Notable in these stories are the sheer number of false statements
and outright propaganda. A Quebec health official talks about 27,000 studies which
demonstrate the safety of fluoridation! Very little of these distortions need be
foisted on the unsuspecting public if the writer or editor were to put “fluoride”
into the search button on their computer. (The Fluoride Action Network remains
Google’s #1-listed site for fluoride. Getting people to FAN’s website –
http://www.FluorideAlert.org — is probably the single most important thing an
individual can do to help this cause.

More positive news.

Thanks to a plug from the Organic Consumers Association, the number of health
professionals who have signed the Professionals’ Statement calling for end to
fluoridation worldwide went over 1500 yesterday (
http://fluoridealert.org/professionals.statement.html ).

The number of citizens who have sent the ONLINE MESSAGE to Congress supporting the
professionals’ statement and calling for Congressional Hearings went over 9,700
yesterday.

The number of people who have now watched the Osmunson video is one hit away from
17,000 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ys9q1cvKGk ), and

The number of people who have watched David Kennedy’s video “Poisoned Horses” on
YouTube has gone over 1100 in just two days! David points out that this 8-minute
video is an edited version of a 28 minute DVD which he will be distributing shortly.
He says if you like the 8 minute video the 28 minute version will blow your socks
off. By the way it is Cathy and Wayne Justus ? not “Justice” as I had mistakenly
written in the last bulletin.

Australian Update

Finally, an interesting footnote about the meeting in Randolph VT. About 20 minutes
into the presentation I received a phone call from an Australian radio station (the
Greg Cary Morning show). I excused myself from the meeting to go live on the Greg
Cary show and talk about the Open Letter I had sent to Premier Anna Bligh in
Queensland, which so many of you supported in an online message to Queensland MPs
and Ministers. Thank you - this was a fabulous response. I heard from the producer
that the bill was introduced but not discussed on February 26. It cannot come up
again until March 11, the next session of Parliament. So citizens have more time to
mobilize public opinion against this forced fluoridation of the whole state.)

Paul Connett

——————————-

Questions for the Vermont Department of Health

1. a) Is it your position that the National Research Council 507-page report of
March 22, 2006, is not relevant to water fluoridation?

1. b) Is this position based upon any written analysis by you (or by any other
agency on which you rely)?

1. c) If so please provide a copy of this analysis.

2. a) The NRC (2006) panel recommended that the US EPA perform a new health risk
assessment to determine a new safe drinking water standard goal (MCLG). Have you
been told why after 23 months the EPA has not done this?

2. b) Have you attempted your own health risk assessment based upon the end points
discussed in the NRC (2006) report as well as the exposure analysis provided in
chapter 2?

2. c) Are you aware that if standard methodologies are used a new MCLG would have to
be set less than 1 ppm to protect everyone in society, including vulnerable subsets
of the population?

3. Are you aware of any peer-reviewed and published studies from Vermont or the US,
which have investigated a possible relationship between consumption of fluoridated
water and various ailments, including:

arthritic symptoms in adults?
hypo-thyroidism (underactive thyroid)?
lowered IQ in children?
Increased bone fractures in children?
Earlier onset of puberty?
Alzheimer’s disease in adults?
Accumulation of fluoride in the pineal gland and lowered melatonin production?

Or which have investigated formally the many anecdotal reports that some individuals
are highly sensitive to fluoride?

Or which has repudiated Elise Bassin’s findings of an association between a 5-7 fold
increase in osteosarcoma (a frequently fatal bone cancer) in young men and exposure
to fluoride in their 6th, 7th and 8th years of life?

4. Knowing that approximately 50% of the fluoride humans take in each day
accumulates in their bones, are you aware of any systematic and comprehensive
attempt to measure fluoride in the bones of the American population to see how close
some individuals are getting to levels associated with pre-clinical, phase 1, phase
II or phase III skeletal fluorosis, as well as levels associated with increased
susceptibility to bone fractures in animal studies and clinical trials?

5. a) Are you aware of any peer-reviewed and published studies of the incidence of
dental fluorosis in Vermont?

5. b) Do you have any reason to believe that the incidence in Vermont is
significantly less than the national averages reported by Heller et al. in 1997 and
the CDC in 2005?

5. c) Do you have any concern that the national figures indicate that American
children today are experiencing dental fluorosis in fluoridated communities at three
times the rate, and in more severe categories, than the levels predicted by the
early promoters of fluoridation?

6. a) Knowing that dental fluorosis is a biomarker of a child’s over-exposure to
fluoride before his or her permanent teeth have erupted, are you aware of any
peer-reviewed and published studies in Vermont or America, which have examined a
possible association between various childhood complaints with the severity of
dental fluorosis?

6. b) What evidence has satisfied you that when a child has developed dental
fluorosis that fluoride has caused no other damage to the child’s developing
tissues?

7. a) On November 9, 2006 the ADA issued an alert to its members recommending that
parents not make up baby formula with fluoridated tap water? What steps have you
taken to inform parents of this recommendation?

7. b) Have any communities in Vermont offered assistance to low-income families who
cannot afford bottled water (or reverse osmosis or distillation equipment) to meet
this recommendation?

8. a) Bearing in mind that there is little, if any, evidence of a difference in
tooth decay between fluoridated countries (or states or counties or communities) and
non-fluoridated ones today, why is this practice so adamantly promoted by state
health officials?

8. b) Are you aware of any study which uses a methodology involving double blind and
randomized selection of cases and controls, which demonstrates the effectiveness of
ingested fluoride to reduce tooth decay?

9. a) On the Vermont Department of Health’s website, fluoride is described as a
nutrient. Could you please provide a list of either animal or human studies which
support the notion that fluoride is an essential nutrient?

9. b) If fluoride was essential for the protection of children’s teeth, could you
explain why the level of fluoride in mothers milk is so very low (0.004 ppm)? Does
the Vermont Department of Health know more about what a baby needs than nature?

10. a) Are there any communities in Vermont which do not have access to fluoridated
toothpaste?

10. b) What percentage of Vermont families cannot afford fluoridated toothpaste?

10. c) Bearing in mind that the CDC in 1999, and again in 2001, conceded that the
predominant benefit of fluoride was TOPICAL not SYSTEMIC, would it not make more
sense to make sure that families of low income are supplied free fluoridated
toothpaste (*) through the WIC program rather than spending millions of taxpayers’
money on fluoridating chemicals, equipment, testing, maintenance, hazmat equipment
and training, and promotion of this practice?

* I indicated at the meeting my preference for xylitol toothpaste. Even with
parental supervision some children swallow some of the toothpaste. Moreover, some of
the fluoride will enter the bloodstream via the gums. PC.