Fluoride's Brain Damage Studies Mounting
NEW YORK, Sept. 15, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Studies showing fluoride can lower IQ are just the tip of the iceberg in fluoride/neurotoxicity research, according to evidence presented by attorney Michael Connett, Fluoride Action Network's (FAN) Special Projects Director at the 5th Annual FAN Conference on September 6, 2014.
Public health officials never considered brain effects before instigating fluoride's addition to water supplies starting in 1945, attempting to reduce children's tooth decay.
"Accumulating brain research suggests that adding fluoride chemicals en masse to public water supplies may be having a similarly disastrous effect on children's brains as did lead chemicals that were once added to gasoline," says Connett.
Human research now shows that fluoride can damage the fetal brain, adversely affect newborn babies' behavior, damage the central nervous system of fluoride-exposed workers, and affect performance on neurological assessment tests.
And the IQ studies keep on coming. Forty one out of 48 studies show fluoride reduces IQ; 17 at levels the US EPA claims are safe.
Over 100 animal studies show fluoride can directly damage the brain; with another 30 animal studies showing fluoride impairs learning or memory -- including four published in 2014. In one study published this year in the journal Physiology & Behavior, researchers found that fluoride "induces cognitive deficits and anxiety-depression-like behaviors in mice." (Liu 2014)
In the early 1990s, toxicologist Dr. Phyllis Mullenix predicted that fluoride could cause "IQ deficits and/or learning disabilities in humans" based on the behavioral effects she observed in fluoride-exposed rats in her laboratory at the Harvard-affiliated Forsythe Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Mullenix's prediction has now been confirmed by dozens of fluoride IQ and animal learning/memory studies. Mullenix's own research career, however, was left in shambles after reporting her findings. She was fired, and years of government funding suddenly went dry.
The treatment of Mullenix, a leading scientist at a Harvard-affiliated research institution, "put a chilling effect on US research into fluoride's brain effects," says Connett.
Researchers in other countries, however, have continued investigating fluoride's toxic effects on the brain and this research is now starting to be heeded by western scientists. Earlier this year, a paper in The Lancet classified fluoride as one of the few chemicals known to damage the developing brain in humans.
More fluoride/brain information here: http://fluoridealert.org/issues/health/brain/
