IFIN BULLETIN: IFIN # 846: Public Health warning #1.
September 15, 2003
Dear All,
This is the first in a series of 14 bulletins in which I will be focussing on public health warnings on fluoridation which are being ignored by public health officials as well as many non-governmental organizations otherwise engaged in protecting the public health.
1. The very low level of fluoride in mothers' milk.
For our first public health warning, we start at the beginning: baby's first meal.
According to the Institute of Medicine (I0M, 1997, page 292), "The fluoride concentration in human milk ranges from 0.007 to 0.011 mg/liter (Ekstrand et al., 1984; Esala et al. 1982; Spak et al., 1982)." In other words the level of the fluoride ion in mothers' milk is approximately 0.01 ppm, which is 100 times lower than that added to the public water supply where water fluoridation is practiced. This means that a baby, which is bottle fed with milk formula made up with fluoridated tap water will be getting 100 times more fluoride than nature had intended.
As far as the practice of water fluoridation is concerned we should be concerned about this on two fronts. First of all this very low natural level of fluoride in mothers' milk is telling us that fluoride is not necessary for healthy teeth, healthy bones or healthy anything else. Mothers' milk has been designed by nature over a huge period of time to present to the baby the ideal mixture of nutrients for early growth. As apologists for fluoridation are swift to point out the fluoride ion is readily available in nature -indeed it is the 13th most abundant element in the earth's crust, so it is not through any lack of availability which causes it to be so low in mothers' milk. Indeed, life evolved from the sea which has an average concentration of fluoride ion of about 1.3 ppm. This low level further underlines the fact that no evidence has been presented to persuade the scientific community that fluoride is a nutrient. In particular, no disease has ever been shown to be caused by lack of fluoride.
Some apologists for fluoridation, like a spokesperson for the Victorian Department of Heath in Australia, have claimed that mothers' milk does not guarantee an ideal nutritional mix for the baby. They give as evidence for this the fact that in some instances mothers' milk is low in folic acid leading to avoidable damage to the baby. However, this is not a good example because folic acid cannot be made in the body and if it is low in mothers' milk it simply reflects the fact that the mother's diet is low in this substance. There are other examples we could sight where a mother on a poor diet, will provide a poorer quality milk to her baby. However, in the case of fluoride, a mother on a healthy diet, with an abundant supply of fluoride, will not pass more than a miniscule amount of this on to her baby in her milk. There is a concern where a mother is getting excess fluoride in her diet about her passing fluoride onto her baby during fetal growth because fluoride can cross the placental membrane. In China they have found excess levels of fluoride in the bones and the brains of aborted fetuses.
Dr. Vyvyan Howard, an infant and fetal pathologist from the University of Liverpool in the UK puts the situation this way:
"Nature appears to have evolved a mechanism of minimizing the exposure of infants to fluoride. Human breast milk only contains between 5 and 10 parts per billion of fluoride, while adult blood contains between 59 and 640 parts per billion. However chloride, a closely associated halogen ion that is essential for life, is present in breast milk at 360,000 parts per billion. There must be an evolutionary selection pressure operating for this selective exclusion of an otherwise highly diffusible anion."
The second reason for concern is the notion that fluoride is so low in mothers' milk because nature was aware of fluoride's extremely high biological activity and therefore had good reasons for keeping it away from the baby's developing tissues. We now know that fluoride can inhibit many enzymes; can interfere with the normal fucntioning of several metal ions like calcium and magnesium, and in the presence of a trace amount of aluminum can switch on G-proteins, thereby interfering with he messaging system of many important messengers such as water soluble hormones, growth factors and neurotransmitters.
In 1978, Dr. Arvid Carlsson (Nobel laureate in Medicine in 2000) offered as one of his key reasons for opposing fluoridation in Sweden, was the concerns he had about the extra exposure to the developing brain cells of a new born baby bottle fed with formula made up with fluoridated tap water.
This concern appears prophetic now that evidence from China indicates that children's IQ appears to be lowered by water containing as little as 1.8 ppm fluoride (see Public Health warning #9, to come).
Paul Connett.
PS I would welcome readers comments about this Public Health Warning and any of the other 13 warnings to come in future bulletins.