The medical and public health community is shocked by the news that young American girls are reaching puberty at ages as young as 7 years (1). However, according to Paul Connett, PhD, Director of the Fluoride Action Network, “If fluoride’s dangers had not been taken off the scientific radar screen by the US Public Health Service when it prematurely endorsed fluoridation in 1950, maybe key warning signals would not have been ignored for over 50 years.”
In 1956, it was reported, after one of the first fluoridation trials (1945-55) had been completed in Newburgh/Kingston NY, that young girls were starting to menstruate on average five months earlier in fluoridated Newburgh compared to non-fluoridated Kingston (2). This result was ignored and there was no follow-up research.
In 1997, Dr. Jennifer Luke in the UK, as part of her PhD thesis (3), reported that fluoride accumulates in the human pineal gland. The pineal gland produces the important hormone melatonin which acts like a biological clock. One of the processes it is thought to control is the onset of puberty. Luke published this work in 2001 but the result has been ignored and no fluoridating country has attempted to repeat her findings, something which would be easy to do if there was the will to do so.
Luke also found that animals exposed to fluoride had lowered melatonin levels and showed signs of reaching puberty earlier. Again this result has been ignored and no fluoridating government has attempted to repeat Luke’s work.
Connett says, “We are not saying that exposure to fluoride is a definite cause of early puberty in girls, but not pursuing this possibility is bad for science, bad for medicine and bad for public health.”
Simply put: if you don’t look, you don’t find. The medical community is being kept in the dark on the possibility that fluoride, a highly toxic substance, which is deliberately added to the drinking water of 184 million Americans daily, is causing a variety of harms from the subtle to the serious.
Connett says, “Apparently, it has become more important for the American Dental Association and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies of the US Department of Health and Human Services to protect this outdated, unethical, ineffective and the dangerous practice than it is to protect the health of the American people. Key research is not being done. Doctors are not being warned.”
This and other tragic aspects of the US’s peculiar obsession with fluoridation are to be documented in an upcoming book co-authored by Connett. The book, titled “The Case Against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics That Keep it There,” will be published by Chelsea Green in early October of this year.
1) Study: More U.S. girls starting puberty early by Amanda Gardner, CNN, August 10, 2010
2) Newburgh-Kingston caries-fluorine study. XIII. Pediatric findings after ten years.
J Am Dent Assoc. 1956 Mar;52(3):296-306. SCHLESINGER ER, OVERTON DE, CHASE HC, CANTWELL KT.
3) Luke J. (2001). Fluoride deposition in the aged human pineal gland. Caries Research 35:125-128.