03/16/23
The National Toxicology Program (NTP) on Wednesday released a draft report linking prenatal and childhood fluoride exposure to reduced IQ in children, after public health officials tried for almost a year to block its publication.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially
blocked the NTP from releasing the report, according to emails obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
But a
court order stemming from a
lawsuit filed by Food and Water Watch against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) forced the report’s release this week...
The report, containing a monograph and a meta-analysis, went through two rounds of peer review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Comments from reviewers and HHS and NTP’s responses also were included in the report released Wednesday.
According to its website, the NTP “removed the hazardous classification of fluoride” in response to comments in the peer-review process. Yet, the report states:
“Our meta-analysis confirms results of previous meta-analyses and extends them by including newer, more precise studies with individual-level exposure measures.
“The data support a consistent inverse association between fluoride exposure and children’s IQ …
“The results were robust to stratifications by risk of bias, gender, age group, outcome assessment, study location, exposure timing, and exposure type (including both drinking water and urinary fluoride).”
...The controversial report will play a key role in determining the outcome of a lawsuit brought in 2017 by several nonprofits against the EPA to end fluoridation of drinking water, plaintiffs’ attorney Michael Connett told The Defender.
“We had to fight hard to have this report even made public,” Connett said. “They [CDC and HHS] buried this. If they had gotten their way, this report would have never even seen the light of day,” Connett said.
Since the trial began in 2020, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen has been waiting for the NTP to complete a systematic review of fluoride’s neurotoxicity before ruling on the case.
Groups like the American Dental Association publicly pressured the NTP to “exclude any neurotoxin claims” from the reports.
Connett said during the trial, the EPA repeatedly claimed that the plaintiffs’ allegations about toxicity could not be verified because there was no “systematic review.”
The documents released Wednesday fill that gap...
According to the NTP report:
“The current bodies of experimental animal studies and human mechanistic evidence do not provide clarity on the association between fluoride exposure and cognitive or neurodevelopmental human health effects.”
Yet, the report’s summary contradicts this statement by summarizing the evidence informing this conclusion, stating that nearly all studies examined for this literature review found evidence of cognitive or developmental issues associated with fluoride...
“We have stressed in our monograph that our conclusions apply to total fluoride exposures rather than to exposures exclusively through drinking water.”
“What the NTP is pointing to here is that in some communities, where the dose of fluoride in the water is 0.7 mg/L, the NTP has found levels of fluoride found to be associated with lower IQ,” Connett told The Defender...
“The margin of safety here just doesn’t exist — it is precariously small,” Connett said. He added that the lawsuit is “basically a risk assessment of fluoride.”...
Then the agency determines in a given case whether the margin between the existing hazard levels and the human exposure levels is unacceptably close, which would make a toxin pose a risk to human health.
Connett said that in EPA’s previous risk assessments for other chemicals, such as methylene chloride or bromopropane, evaluated according to the 2020 risk evaluation method that guides this case, the agency found the hazard level exceeds the human exposure level by much higher margins — “usually in a range of ten to 20 times higher,” yet it has deemed those chemicals to present an unreasonable risk to human health.
In other words, the substances were found to be toxic to humans at levels significantly higher than what people may be exposed to in regular use, yet the EPA determined them to be risks.
When it makes that determination, the EPA must then take steps to mitigate the risk.
That can also be the finding in this case. According to a pre-trial document, both sides in the case agreed to the “undisputed fact” that the “EPA does not require that human exposure levels exceed a known adverse effect level to make an unreasonable risk determination under TSCA.”
The NTP documents also raised flags about the implications of seemingly small neurotoxic effects:
“Research on other neurotoxicants has shown that subtle shifts in IQ at the population level can have a profound impact on the number of people who fall within the high and low ranges of the population’s IQ distribution.
“For example, a 5-point decrease in a population’s IQ would nearly double the number of people classified as intellectually disabled.”
...The monograph and meta-analysis released yesterday on the NTP’s website are both labeled “draft.”
“Unfortunately, fluoridation promoters and high-level government officials have continued to label it a draft,” North said. “It wasn’t.”
Experts associated with the lawsuit against the EPA will now analyze and interpret the report in future hearings and then Judge Chen will rule.
The next hearing date is scheduled for April 11, 2023. At that time, the judge will set a date for the next phase of the trial
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Originally Posted by woodman
