Fluoride: What science to 'believe' in?
The Ministry of Health might not want to budge, but putting blinkers on, locking into out-of-date policy & using proxy authorities to mimic risk assessment will just foster distrust.
I’ve only just had a one-minute video clip pass in front of my nose on Twitter.
The brief interaction was between Mary Byrne from Fluoride Free New Zealand, and Dr Shane Reti in around May-June 2023.
Reti is now Minister for Health, following the 2023 October election. As a medically trained and qualified doctor, he is of course, very familiar with scientific concepts and the scientific literature.
Transcript:
Mary Byrne (Fluoride Free): Are you aware that the US government’s top scientific body, the National Toxicology Programme has recently completed a six-year review of fluoride and neurotoxicity. Since they have confirmed that fluoride does lower IQ and there is no known level where fluoride does not cause harm what reason would you have to continue fluoridation today?
Dr Shane Reti (National Party MP): The reason I have is that I believe in a different science. It’s one of those issues where we each need to find the different science that we believe. I found a different set of science and I believe that fluoride does prevent dental decay and I don’t believe it causes harm.
Mary Byrne (Fluoride Free): (interjecting) This is top US science.
Dr Shane Reti (National Party MP): You’ve found your truth, I’ve found my truth. I live in Northland which has the …
Mary Byrne (Fluoride Free): (interjecting) But what science?
Dr Shane Reti (National Party MP): That is the science that is a body of literature around the world that is substantively…
Mary Byrne (Fluoride Free): (interjecting) But what science?
Dr Shane Reti (National Party MP): I’m not going to give you a date and time here but I believe that and I live in an area which has the highest dental decay of anyone, actually. So I do believe it is evidence.
Mary Byrne (Fluoride Free): Children’s brains are more important.
Back then, of course, Reti wasn’t Minister Reti. He didn’t have a plethora of researchers and policy wonks surrounding him. But he does now.
I’m watching Reti closely as Health Minister because I consider – if he has sufficient principled courage to sufficiently distance himself from the National Party whips and the gargantuan Ministry of Health bureaucracy, and if he has the chutzpah to ask a tonne of questions, he could achieve more than any previous Minister of Health has in the past twenty years. In order to achieve this, he might familiarise himself with Joseph.
After Reti spoke at a medical doctors’ conference a few years ago, attendees commented that they believed he had integrity, and that he appeared to appreciate the extent to which diet-driven chronic disease was harming health in New Zealand.
Once a body of evidence starts to accumulate, it is unlikely to be reversed.
There’s a wide body of public law that demands that public servants do not turn away from inconvenient facts. To do so can damage trust, it can lead to the abuse of power, and may result in harm.
Reti knows very well that the most vulnerable developmental time is in pregnancy, infancy and early childhood. We’ve been not so good, in recent times, at thinking about the ethics of exposing healthy children to a medical intervention.
Reality Check Radio have just released a short, high quality, easy to watch, NZ-based documentary, produced by filmmaker Alistair Harding, that discusses the weight of evidence issue. I’m in it.
It’s a case of the weight of evidence and how we act to precautionarily protect our youngest citizens. Not belief.
The fluoride-controversy extends far beyond the claimed wobbly evidence of efficacy Vs the increasing weight of evidence demonstrating fluoride increases risk for developmental neurotoxicity and IQ, and that US court cases have confirmed that a safe level has never been identified.
THE PROBLEM OF PREDETERMINATION & BIAS
But belief is part of the problem. When peer review committee members almost exclusively include actors with a long history of advocating for fluoridation of drinking water - there can be no impartiality.
Perhaps Minister Reti would appreciate, as I have discussed for PSGR, that at times our peer review committees may be ‘stacked’ with individuals that are biased to a predetermined outcome.
Of course, the Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor (OPMCSA) is at its core, a political position, residing inside the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC).
Asking this OPMCSA to undertake a version of risk profiling as a proxy risk assessment agency, without an independently trained panel of toxicologists and experts in endocrinology (as fluoride exerts endocrine disrupting effects on the thyroid hormone) does not reflect best practice when it comes to a risk evaluation of a health or harm pathway.
The courts will likely find whether such an activity fails because it flings a bunch of administrative law principles out the proverbial car window, like a cigarette with embers that still glow.
As I discussed in a PSGR video, it is a little strange, is just how blithely the National Toxicology Programme finding on the neurotoxic potential was dismissed by the OPMCSA (‘no convincing evidence’), in the face of the expert authority of this NTP.
Selecting or ‘cherry picking’ to believe in the findings of one US or UK authority and then ignoring or downplaying the findings from these same jurisdictions when a finding contradicts your opinion merely promotes public distrust of public authority.
Gluckman and Skegg’s 2014 review was extensive, but it was not a methodological risk assessment. It is now 10 years old. Citing the 2014 paper, then relying on the discussion in a far less detailed OPMCSA 2021 Update - while downplaying the NTP report was disingenuous and unscientific.
THE ULTRAPROCESSED ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
Minister Reti is obviously painfully aware that dental decay is a terrible problem in the community he serves. But in his fluoridation pragmatism, I wonder if he is setting aside the unfortunate fact that while fluoridation may (or may not) slightly lower dental decay it is not preventative or curative of dental decay. His population will still suffer from dental decay and all the historic comorbid conditions associated with poor oral health.
A claimed - but contested - marginal improvement in caries will often not prevent the health risk from caries and the knock-on effects of chronic inflammation. Fluoridation of drinking water claims to only lower how many caries a person may develop.
The poor oral health is driven by poor diets.
Not just sugar sweetened beverages, but an excess of refined flour, white rice and dietary sugar, often in the form of an ultraprocessed diet which poorer problems in New Zealand, Australia, the USA and the UK routinely consume as a large proportion of their diet.
In the UK and US, well over half the average diet now consists of ultra-processed food (UPF). For some, especially people who are younger, poorer or from disadvantaged areas, a diet comprising as much as 80% UPF is typical.
An ultraprocessed food diet exerts a metabolic toll that directly impairs and suppresses neurological functioning. People on ultraprocessed food diets suffer impact to both metabolic and mental health.
Adding fluoride to drinking water adds another neurotoxic risk to low-income communities already burdened by synthetically refined food-like substances.
It would be perhaps more affordable and safer to ensure Reti’s local community had access to toothpaste and toothbrushes, as the greater benefit from fluoride exposure is from topical application.
Reti’s researchers and aids can calculate what the budget would be to purchase toothbrushes and toothpaste and, just like condoms and tampons, have them in schools at every stage, or say passed out at the start of each school term.
MAURI - LIFE - FAILURE TO CONSIDER FRESHWATER VITALITY
Minister Reti possibly needs to recognise that somehow, mysteriously, the New Zealand Environmental Protection Authority (NZEPA) has stepped away from any duties relating to risk assessment on this subject, for decades.
Noting that not medical grade fluoride, but that the complete hydrofluorosilicic acid (HFA) formulation which will be ‘dosed’ into Northland water. The NZEPA haven’t risk assessed the substance. Nor (mysteriously) is consent to emit required by the local regional council. Somehow this has all been sewn up.
Do tangata whenua understand this - especially when considered alongside quite extensive literature on the potential harm of fluoride/fluorine?
Perhaps local tāngata whenua could be consulted on the fact that HFA - which has never been risk assessed by the NZEPA - will be emitted from wastewater treatment plants. AS HFA is a by-product of the fertiliser process, perhaps tangata whenua should be permitted to discuss whether they approve of chronic emissions to local waters from HFA. Perhaps tangata whenua might be funded to screen the HFA to identify the extent to which it is (naturally) contaminated with even low levels of heavy metals.
Tell me: how will the aquatic fauna respond when exposed during all developmental stages?
Perhaps this video of a presentation that I gave (0-28 minutes), to the Bay of Plenty Regional Council which notes that the NZEPA has never conducted a risk assessment to identify whether the sustained emission of either HFA or fluoride into New Zealand freshwater poses a risk to freshwater ecology and the mauri of the water.
I believe Reti is a good man. But he is up against a very powerful Ministry that has adopted a predetermined position on the safety of fluoride for 50 years.
A Ministry that does not undertake methodological reviews of the scientific literature to assess the changing weight of evidence on contested issues - nor contract, for example universities or public institutions to do this - at arm’s length from Ministry bureaucrats and party-political whips.
However, the scientific literature is well underway – on many, many fronts – contradicting the predetermined position of government departments that pretend that fluoridation will fix a problem when it best, it may only slightly ameliorate that one problem.
But Reti - and the Government perpetually set themselves up for judicial review if they insist on considering these issues in isolation.
There is much work to be done if Reti is to meaningfully honour his constituents.
In the meantime …
Excellent as usual. I hadn't thought of the downstream effects of fluoride on water quality - good point.
Excellent Jodie. Thank you. Hopefully our politicians and councillors will get with the truth before too long, and, cease & desist from poisoning our water and whanau. 🙏