EPA Blocks Public Comment on Fluoridation

By Paul Connett, PhD

(OMNS Dec 11, 2017)-- On December 7 and 8, the EPA's National Drinking Water Advisory Council held its annual meeting at their headquarters office on Constitutional Avenue in Washington, DC. After sitting through lengthy discussions all day on December 7 (in which the word "fluoride" was not mentioned once), Bill Hirzy PhD, Ellen Connett and myself (Paul Connett) finally got our chance to speak during the Public Comment period on Friday morning, Dec 8.

We were told that we had three minutes each to say what we had to say. When you bear in mind all the things that we wanted to say about fluoride's neurotoxic effects - which the EPA's Office of Water has largely ignored for over 20 years - and their recent cavalier declaration that further review of fluoride's toxicity was a "low priority," three minutes was grossly inadequate. In fact, not one of us got very far before we were cut off.

Here as best we can recall it are what each of us had to say in our 3 minutes before we were cut off.

Dr. Bill Hirzy reports:

I cited my 27-year career as the highest ranking chemist/senior scientist at EPA headquarters in the Toxics Office and my study of fluoride toxicity dating from 1986. I pointed out the study that Dr. Connett, three other Fluoride Action Network (FAN) supporters and I published in December 2016, and how it predicted a substantial IQ difference would exist between U.S. children with slightly higher fluoride exposure and those with lower exposure.

I added that "a study funded by federal public health agencies (Basash et al., 2017) - including EPA - recently confirmed FAN's prediction of IQ losses among children in Mexico whose pregnant mothers' urine fluoride levels were slightly higher than mothers with lower fluoride levels. And that FAN's prediction of lower IQ associated with fluoride exposure had been transmitted several times to EPA, orally and in writing, since 2014."

I was cut off at that point.

I was going to point out that the groups of children born each year - about four million - would suffer an aggregate lifetime income loss of at least about $100 billion, based on published data on the connection between IQ and income; that this was an annual loss to the U.S. economy.

I also stated, at the very end of the meeting (after the chairperson had gaveled the meeting to a close) that I realized that EPA was - in the federal power structure of cabinet vs. non-cabinet agencies - a junior partner to the Department of Health and Human Services, the parent agency of the U.S. Public Health Service and its CDC/Oral Health Division. I entreated the EPA officials there to nevertheless display some courage, "buck it up," I said and "show the courage that EPA's Union employees have shown in dealing with fluoride."

Ellen Connett reports: