Week 12: Post your Blog Entries as Comments to my Main Post Each Week

Post by Sunday at midnight.

This is the link to the original article on the "raw material regime" of fluoride by Bryson/Griffiths:

http://biostate.blogspot.com/2005/12/why-fluoride-in-us-water-us-militarys.html

It has some of my commentary in brackets as an introduction, and some additional pictures.

There are updates to this story over the past several years in the 'comments'--so read to the bottom of that link.

I chose fluoride for analysis of raw material regime first because it is a particularly clear example of a legitimated raw material regime. (Oil, which we will talk about next, or narcotic drugs, are still raw material regimes, though with less legitimation.)

Particularly for most of the world's population, it is important to understand what is mean by a 'regime' of a material: a culturally legitimate and culturally accepted raw material use by institutions, governments, etc.

It is hardly a stable material regime if everyone thinks it is illegitimate.

So the legitimacy (particularly the (sold) legitimacy around fluoride and micro-level habit) is an important variable explaining their durability--or their change.

Below is some of Bryson's first investigative article, summarized:

Human exposure to fluoride has mushroomed since World War II, due not only to fluoridated water and toothpaste, but to environmental pollution by major industries from aluminum to pesticides: fluoride is a critical industrial chemical.

The impact can be seen, literally, in the smiles of our children. Large numbers of U.S. young people--up to 80 percent in some cities--now have dental fluorosis, the first visible sign of excessive fluoride exposure, according to the U.S. National Research Council. (The signs are whitish flecks or spots, particularly on the front teeth, or dark spots or stripes in more severe cases.)

Less-known to the public is that fluoride also accumulates in bones --"The teeth are windows to what's happening in the bones," explains Paul Connett, Professor of Chemistry at St. Lawrence University (N.Y.). In recent years, pediatric bone specialists have expressed alarm about an increase in stress fractures among U.S. young people. Connett and other scientists are concerned that fluoride --linked to bone damage by studies since the 1930's-- may be a contributing factor. The declassified documents add urgency: much of the original proof that low-dose fluoride is safe for children's bones came from U.S. bomb program scientists, according to this investigation.

Now, researchers who have reviewed these declassified documents fear that Cold War national security considerations may have prevented objective scientific evaluation of vital public health questions concerning fluoride.

"Information was buried," concludes Dr. Phyllis Mullenix, former head of toxicology at Forsyth Dental Center in Boston, and now a critic of fluoridation. Animal studies Mullenix and co-workers conducted at Forsyth in the early 1990's indicated that fluoride was a powerful central nervous system (CNS) toxin, and might adversely affect human brain functioning, even at low doses. (New epidemiological evidence from China adds support, showing a correlation between low-dose fluoride exposure and diminished I.Q. in children.) Mullenix's results were published in 1995, in a reputable peer-reviewed scientific journal. [The Nazis and the Soviets were known to put high levels of flouride in prison camp water because they knew then that it made the prisoners less mentally capable, more tractile, and docile.]

During her investigation, Mullenix was astonished to discover there had been virtually no previous U.S. studies of fluoride's effects on the human brain. Then, her application for a grant to continue her CNS research was turned down by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), where an NIH panel, she says, flatly told her that "fluoride does not have central nervous system effects."

Declassified documents of the U.S. atomic-bomb program indicate otherwise.

An April 29, 1944 Manhattan Project memo reports: "Clinical evidence suggests that uranium hexafluoride [UF^6] may have a rather marked central nervous system effect.... It seems most likely that the F [code for fluoride] component rather than the T [code for uranium] is the causative factor."

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