Another article has just been published in which Chinese researchers have found a lowering of IQ in children exposed to natural fluoride in their drinking water. A pdf copy of the paper may be accessed at

http://www.ehponline.org/members/2007/9270/9270.pdf.

Two things are important about the publication of this study:

1) It is the first primary study on this matter to be published in a leading environmental health journal in the United States. The journal is the Environmental Health Perspectives, a very important journal in this field. Coming on the heels of the review article by Philippe Grandjean and Philip Landrigan (“The Developmental Neurotoxicity of Industrial Chemicals”) in the Lancet published last November, which included a discussion of fluoride as a potential neurotoxin, as well as the publication of the National Research Council Review (NRC, 2006) which carried a whole chapter on fluoride’s impact on the brain, neither scientific researchers nor government officials can any longer claim ignorance of this issue.

 2) It underlines the serious consequences to both science and public health when politics interferes with the open distribution of scientific literature. Although the association between fluoride and lowering of IQ in children in China has been common knowledge (since the 1990s), for scientists who have had access to the journal Fluoride, sadly many other scientists have been unaware of this important issue, because PubMed (largely we believe through political pressure from the U.S. Public Health Service) has kept this important journal off its search engine. Fortunately, accessibility to articles in Fluoride is improving as the journal is now available on the internet, and other search engines include it in their searches. Moreover, the National Research Council cited many articles from this source.

So, ironically, when pro-fluoridation zealots claim that the only science which indicates health problems with drinking fluoridated water is “junk science” gleaned from the internet, here is a clear case where the internet (particularly http://www.SLweb.org and our own http://www.FluorideAction.net  web sites) has been making solid, peer reviewed and published literature on an important subject available for many years before “mainstream” journals were even aware of its existence.

The authors of this article themselves underline how serious it is for PubMed to have kept the journal Fluoride out of it searches. Even they were unaware of the fact that many articles on this matter had appeared in Fluoride, when they wrote: "To the best of our knowledge, fluoride is not known to affect intellectual function of children in the literatures published in English, although Chinese literatures point to significant impairment on children's intellectual function...” (my emphasis) and in their discussion section they wrote “A literature search on fluoride and intelligence on Medline returned only studies conducted in China and none from western literatures" (my emphasis).

Along with the chemistry department of St. Lawrence University, the Fluoride Action Network is hosting a visit to the United States by Dr. Quanjong Xiang in February. Dr. Xiang is lead author of an important study published in 2003 , which estimated that a lowering of IQ in children would occur at levels of fluoride as low as 1.8 ppm.

Bottom line question: with over 30 animal studies indicating that fluoride can damage the brain (and in one case at levels as low as 1 ppm), and at least a half a dozen studies from China indicating a lowering of IQ in children, why on earth would any parent knowingly risk harming their child’s brain in order to pursue a miniscule (and questionable) saving in tooth decay? As far as the quality of studies is concerned, ironically, the quality of the studies which indicate that fluoride damages the brain, are actually superior to the studies which purport to show that fluoridated drinking water reduces tooth decay!  How about popping that one into a “precautionary principle” calculation?