Sodium monofluoroacetate (sometimes shortened to sodium fluoroacetate) is a highly toxic substance that disrupts the Krebs cycle in animal cells, making it highly toxic to mammals, birds, and insects; any creature that breathes air. Commonly known as “1080″ (a contraction of “Compound 1080“), it has been used to kill non-human “pest” animals since the 1940s. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as quoted by in a 2007 op-ed by Dr Sean Weaver, the “probable oral lethal dose in humans is less than 5mg/kg, or a taste (less than 7 drops) for a 150lb [68kg] person”.

Since it was banned as a rodenticide in the USA in 1990, Aotearoa (NZ) has used around 80%-90% of the 1080 produced in the world each year. In operations organized under the Department of Conservation (DOC), it gets dropped into native forests on conservation land to kill introduced mammalian predators, with the goal of protecting and restoring native bird populations. Other 1080 drops, run by TBFree (overseen by OSPRI), have the goal of protecting livestock from bovine tuberculosis that is allegedly carried by introduced brushtail possums living in the forests around farmland.

Not everyone is happy about this, while other people are very passionate about defending it as a necessary evil. In the comments section of a recent blog piece on the subject, this comment was typical:

“the immediate banning of 1080 would lead to the wholesale extinction of most birdlife on mainland NZ”

Supporters seem very confident about this. But I wonder if they have scientific credentials relevant to this field? If not, they often seem strangely hesitant to offer a source, an article or scientific paper written by someone who does, providing the evidence underlying this conclusion.

Someone with more relevant scientific credentials than myself or any other random commentators is Dr Sean Weaver. A former lecturer in environmental sciences at Victoria University of Wellington, where he still teaches courses as an adjunct lecturer, he is also a veteran of the Native Forest Action (NFA) campaign against logging of native forest by state-owned company Timberlands, in the 1990s. He has published a number of scientific papers questioning the safety and efficacy of 1080, and appeared in the Graf brothers’ documentary ‘Poisoning Paradise‘ (as did a former DOC entomologist, the late Mike Meads). There is also a small group of independent scientists whose website 1080Science checks claims about 1080 against the available scientific literate. Whoever is pumping out the PR key messages that everyone who opposes 1080 is scientifically illiterate, and a useful idiot of the hunting lobby, is wrong, and most likely knows it.

In her response to a new documentary from Hawaii, also called Poisoning Paradise, conservationist Jane Goodall said “We need millions of citizens from around the world to take to the streets in a massive protest against the use of lethal chemicals on our fields and the shocking expose of corruption at high levels”. Yet here in Aotearoa, we have environmentalists at high levels, such as the Green Party MP who holds the Minister of Conservation portfolio in the current government, heaping scorn on those who are taking to the streets to do just that. Clearly there’s more to this issue than meets the eye.

My scientific credentials are limited to a few 100-level undergrad ecology papers. This is supplemented by the various things I’ve read during more than 20 years as an environmental activist, supporting direct action campaigns like NFA, Save Happy Valley (I wrote a report on this area for one of my ecology papers), Project Karangahake, and Oil-Free Otago. But here are a few of my thoughts.

Given that there have been rats and dogs (and possibly pigs) in Aotearoa for around 700 years (at least), but serious species decline began only after scorched-earth European style farming, habitat loss seems to be a much more significant cause of native species decline than mammalian predators. Also, regardless of which population stressor is the most damaging, “mainland island” sanctuaries (like Zealandia and Orokunui) and have been much more effective at revitalizing populations than 1080 drops, with the bonus effect of not killing any of the very birds we’re trying to save. Finally, I don’t often hear any acknowledgement that introduced predators prey on each other, as well as native species, and that uneven dieoff can result in substitution effects. For example, if 1080 kills all of the rats and mice in an area, but not the possums, those possums will replace any rodents they would have eaten with more birds. Again, there’s more to this than meets the eye.

Also, there are a few things that an independent political analysis of this issue ought to be taking into account:

  • Preventing mining of predator-free habitat areas would surely help threatened species, yet even as they increased funding for 1080 drops, the previous National government allowed open cast coal mining activity to increase on scheduled conservation land on the Denniston Plateau, which includes Happy Valley.
  • Public funding for 1080 drops was massively increased under a John Key/ National regime that wrote the book on handing out corporate welfare (Sky City, America’s Cup Team, Tiwai Point Aluminium Smelter, Warner Brothers etc).
  • 1080 drops are a multi-million dollar business, for multiple industries, including helicopter companies, 1080 manufacturers and distributors (including SOE ‘Animal Control Products’ according to a 2015 Dominion Post article by Anthony Hubbard), and the suppliers of the fluoride wastes from various industries from which 1080 is made. Plus all the folks on 6 figure salaries working for QUANGOs like OSPRI and TBFree. All thriving on public money, while families in desparate poverty live in tents.
  • The demonization of anti-1080 protesters as “extremists”, and prone to destruction and violence, is the same tale they spin about all environmental activists when they start to be effective, from direct action campaigners like Native Forest Action to water protection activists elected as ECan Councillors. Why is anyone taking this strategic smearing at face value? What evidence is there for any of the accusations lobbed at anti-1080 protestors?
  • Key’s National regime was so supportive of the environmental movement and its goals, that under their watch, government departments and SOEs massively increased their use of corporate detective companies to spy on green groups, including anti-1080 activists.
  • Recruiting environmentalists to act as “useful idiots” and attack other environmentalists is a common PR tactic used by environmentally damaging industries who hope to greenwash their practices. The “1080: The Facts” website was a joint creation of Forest and Bird and those well-know champions of environmental protection and the public interest, Federated Farmers.

Maybe Kevin Hague was right in his piece on the Spinoff, maybe there is no other way to save threatened species. Maybe the rewards are worth the costs. But surely we can have a mature debate about the very real cons of 1080, based on the facts and research available, rather than engaging in petty name-calling?

There’s been a 1080 page on CounterClaim since 2010. I’ve done considerable work on it today, in the wake of the decision by the NZ SPCA to wade into the 1080 debate, but as always, there’s a lot more to be done. There’s been a lot of linkrot that will take some time to fix. One that this work session made clear to me is that building up long pages of links is of limited use. It’s worth making a quick note in Points of Interest sections when I find something useful to a Counterclaim page while working on something else, and it’s good to have a complete list of the primary sources used in support of any claims on a page. But time working on Counterclaim pages is best spent reading and absorbing the articles I link to, or at the very least the abstracts for peer-reviewed journal articles, and incorporating them into the list of claims and counterclaims which is the heart and soul of the project.

Filed January 11th, 2019 under Uncategorized


“William De Berg” (Giordano Nanni) presents the Juice Rap News version of the New World Order power pyramid

With traditional outlets for journalism; newspapers, radio, and television, owned by an ever smaller handful of corporations and manipulated by the PR industry, and with even public service and academic institutions increasingly interpenetrated by corporations and their agendas, it becomes increasingly difficult to know which information source are reliable, if any. Even in this compromised situation though, we regularly discover that we have indeed been misled by the unholy trinity of governments, mass media, and corporate PR.

Little wonder that many people are becoming increasingly suspicious, and distrustful of “mainstream” discourse. If governments can lie to us about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, using the mass media as an uncritical public address system, how do we know they’re not lying about the events of 9/11, or climate change, or water fluoridation, or extraterrestrial contact, or bigfoot, or anything? Having experienced a sudden loss of faith in the honesty of mainstream institutions, an experience many refer to as “waking up”, people then have to decide which information sources they can trust, and what they should believe about the world.

It’s easy enough to simply assume, that whatever is being claimed by government, mass media, or corporations, the opposite is true. This approach, scoffingly referred to as “contrarian”, has obvious flaws. Sometimes mainstream institutions are forced to admit to the truth, perhaps because one of the few remaining investigative journalists has managed to expose their “orchestrated litany of lies”, such as Nicky Hagar’s work on The Hollow Men, or because of a whistleblower like Edward Snowden, or because a successful large-scale campaign by activist networks and uncorrupted academics has made official denials untenable, such as with climate change. In these cases, the contratrian impulse to believe the opposite rescues defeat from the jaws of victory, leaving people with this mindset vulnerable to corporate PR campaigns designed to undo the work of the journalists, whistleblowers, and activists.

If we can neither trust mainstream discourse, nor presume the opposite, where does that leave us? Ideally, we, the people, would work together, gathering evidence, and analyzing it to find out what is true. But decades of relying on professional “news” media to do that for us, and an education system which values vocational skills over critical thinking, has left most people unprepared for this.

What happens all too often is that we instead shift our uncritical faith from corporate media to a particular brand of alternative media; marxist, anarchist,  libertarian, environmentalist, primitivist, feminist, nationalist, fundamentalist etc. We learn the theories these networks substitute for the mainstream’s just-so-stories about how the world work, treat them as fact, and blame all the problems of the world on whichever boogieman goes with our chosen brand; capitalism, government, industry, civilization, patriarchy, globalists, feminism and so on. We waste time and energy arguing about which of these is “the truth”, not realizing that these are ideologies, frames of reference, and none of them can possibly be the whole truth of a complex, chaotic, and constantly changing world.

Defenders of the status quo exploit this, throwing names like “conspiracy theorist” or “tin-foil hat wearer” at anyone who questions any aspect of mainstream discourse, and recruiting us to throw them at each other. We have become so afraid of being written off as “conspiracy theorists” that we have started to do much of the information policing work of the state-corporate system for it. Our minds have become primed to switch off, and stop listening, whenever a person, text, or documentary uses one of an increasing number of key phrases, such as “new world order” or “imperialism”. We have been conditioned to ignore large chunks of the history of corporate capitalism, because we fear that the mere mention of the names of prominent historical capitalists such as “Rockerfeller” or “Rothchild” in a negative light, is closet anti-semitism, just as the military PR flaks claim any criticism of the Israeli state or the occupation of Palestine is a sign of anti-semitism.

We must overcome this collective self-censorship of alternative discourse, which allows the state-corporate system to divide-and-rule strategy anti-corporatist resistance. But we must also learn to respectfully criticize the theories and speculations which make us vulnerable to disinformation, and to follow the evidence to wherever it leads, whether the conclusions suits our biases or not.

Filed March 17th, 2018 under Uncategorized

In 2011, Auckland University Psychologist Nikki Harre published a book called ‘Psychology for a Better World‘. In an interview by Kim Hill in October of that year, she talked about what people working towards positive social change can learn from the insights drawn from psychological research. Harre is working on a completely revised edition of the book for release in 2018, according to the book’s homepage.

Professional liars, usually described using self-generated euphemisms like “public relations consultant”, have known for decades that psychological principles can be exploited to create or block political-economic changes on behalf of their wealthy clients. Learning how to recognize and counter these manipulation campaigns is essential for journalists, activists in public watchdog groups, and others whose role it is to keep loading truth back into politics every time it drops out. I look forward to the revised edition of Nikki Harre’s book, and recommend checking it out.

Filed September 24th, 2017 under Uncategorized

Today I added a new CounterClaim page about cancer. This is a complex and highly emotive topic, with most adults in the industrialized world knowing at least one person who has died of cancer. It’s also a controversial subject, with many different claims and counterclaims about the relationships between the different types of cancer, what does and doesn’t cause it, or contribute to it, and what does and doesn’t work in treating it.

As with any topic related to both human health and medicine, and the use of chemicals in domestic and industrial products, what people believe about cancer has major consequences for companies in the pharmaceutical and chemicals industries. As such, there’s bound to be PR companies muddying the waters about what scientific findings can really tell us about the nature of cancer, its causes, and its treatment. This PR cancer definitely needs the CounterClaim treatment.

I also did a bit of work on updating the page template that explains how CounterClaim pages are laid out. As well as a bit of minor tweaking of the formatting (eg changing ‘Points of Interest’ to a proper Heading), I added a number of new sections. One is an ‘Improvement Notes’ section at the bottom of the page, where I can record and keep track of tasks that need to be done to improve the page. If and when I can attract other contributors, it may be worth experimenting with using the Tasks tools for this, with a tasks list for each CounterClaim page.

The ‘Points of Interest’ sections will continue to be used for collecting general background info, and dumping links I haven’t yet had time to thoroughly read and use in the page, but I’ve now added two subsections. ‘Primary Sources’ will list all the peer-reviewed papers and other scientific sources relevant to the page topic. ‘News Coverage’ will list relevant articles from news media not identifiably connected to activist groups or think tanks. Articles from partisan groups and organisations will continue to be stored as general ‘Point of Interest’ items, then linked into claims and counterclaims in the tables. All the existing pages will need have these subsections added and populated, which will hopefully stop the general ‘Points of Interest’ working areas from growing like… well… cancers.

As each CounterClaim page grows, I come up with new ideas about what kinds of information need to be included in a CounterClaim page, and how to lay it out, and new solutions to the ongoing challenges of keeping the information on them both thorough and clear. Modifying the page template is a way to record these ideas and solutions while maintaining a reference page that helps to keep a standard page layout across the project. This helps me when creating new pages and updating existing ones, but it also helps keep the project logic clear to any future contributors.

Filed May 28th, 2017 under Uncategorized

As citizens of NZ, contributing to CounterClaim from New Zealand, each member of the CounterClaim project takes full legal responsibility for their copying of any peer-reviewed scientific papers, and other source material copied to the CounterClaim pages for the purposes of private study, research, criticism, review, and news reporting. This non-commercial copying of material restricted by copyright is allowed for such purposes under the “Fair Dealing” exemptions in Part 3 of the NZ Copyright Act (1994). This copying has been in no way checked, approved, or endorsed, by our US-based hosting provider, or their upstream hosting providers, who are absolved of any and all legal responsibility for the contents of CounterClaim by the “Safe Harbour” provisions of the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and other relevant legislation.

Filed May 13th, 2017 under Uncategorized

I spent a big chunk of yesterday working on the Counterclaim page for EMF (ElectroMagnetic Fields) and starting a new page on biochar. These are both areas where a number of well-meaning people (including yours truly), who have been promoting technology they see as socially or environmentally progressive, have come under fire from activists who see them as benefiting only the industrial players involved, and the arguments defending their as misleading PR (Public Relations).

EMF are forms of “non-ionizing radiation” that people have been exposed to for decades. An EMF surrounds everything that has as electrical current flowing through it, from high-tension electric transmission lines to household wiring and appliances. EMF are produced intentionally by modern technologies in the form of the radiofrequency radiation (RF) used in radio and television broadcasts, cell phone networks, wi-fi networks, and most recently wireless “smart meters” that use RF to send electricity usage data from the point of use back to the power company. There have been groups raising public health concerns about EMF pollution for decades, but concerns about the increasing “electrosmog” created by the interaction of all the different forms of EMF people are now being exposed to, and ironically, the ability to access information about them and organise campaigns over the internet, have produced a plethora of new EMF-related watchdog groups.

Public health authorities are under huge pressure from industry not to cry wolf in ways that might be bad for business, and can only make public statements and set regulations based on conclusive scientific data, and if that data supports public health policy that could reduce the profits of powerful companies, it has to be bulletproof to survive the lobbying war that inevitably follows. The WHO has classified cell phone RF as a “possible carcinogen“, which means there is weak evidence that it might cause cancer, which is more than *no* evidence, but not strong enough evidence to come to a firm conclusion either way. The strongest indication that there may be a case to answer is the group of 190 scientists, from 39 nations, who signed the International EMF Scientist Appeal, all of whom have published peer-reviewed studies relating to health effects of EMF.

This is a subject I feel very conflicted about. I have been a vocal proponent of using wi-fi (wireless networking technology) to extend access to the internet to more people more quickly and cheaply than laying cables. Since my time with Indymedia, along with many other media activist, I’ve been excited by the possibilities wi-fi potentially opens up, of an internet infrastructure that doesn’t depend on corporate-owned cables and datacentres. The radically democratic values behind this vision were articulated in the Free Network Definition, by the now seemingly defunct Free Network Foundation. The possibility that all of us who’ve been advocating for this vision have been serving as “useful idiots”, covering for a wi-fi equipment industry profiting from health damaging EMF pollution, is a deeply disturbing one.

I feel similarly conflicted about biochar, which I first came across at gatherings of the permaculture movement. Proponents argued that it could be made from fast-growing noxious weeds, like gorse and blackberry, using community-scale, DIY equipment. They made strong claims about its potential as a technology for harvesting energy from biomass waste, improving soil, increasing food production, and sequestering carbon. I’ve read comments by university academics researching it which seem to back this up, like the late Dr Peter Read who researched biochar at Massey University, in in Aotearoa/ NZ. Yet there are also climate campaigners like George Monbiot of the Guardian and Steven Horn of DeSmogBlog, who dismiss it as unworkable, and worse, claim that it could actually cause more harm to the environment. Are they misinformed, or am I, and other permaculturists who support biochar technology, serving as a useful idiot to investors trying to talk up a potential biochar industry? As usual, creating a CounterClaim page on biochar illustrates that there are more than two sides to this story. From my reading so far, it seems that while the benefits of biochar for large-scale carbon sequestration may have been over-hyped, its potential as a way to produce energy from plant waste and add carbon to depleted soils to improve fertility are still very exciting.

Filed March 30th, 2017 under Uncategorized

In August last year, I announced that this project was being renamed from ‘Drilling for Truth’, the working title it started with. The new name I decided to try out was ‘CoSpiracy’, an obvious pun on the fact that many of the topics researched in this project are the subject of one or more conspiracy theories. As I said in the renaming announcement on the blog, the name was also intended to reference the cooperative approach I want to take to researching the claims documented here, in contrast to the scornful accusations like “anti-science” made by the self-styled “skeptics” who seem to pop up defending corporations and entire industries every time environmentalists and other activists criticize their practices.

After trying it on for size for a few months though, it’s become clear to me that this jocular name doesn’t fit the serious intent of the project. So, from today onwards, having checked that there are no significant existing websites using the name, I’m relieved to announce that this project will be retitled ‘CounterClaim’. This name drills right down to what distinguishes this project from the many others that cover similar topics, the particular claim/ counterclaim format that is used here to map out all sides of controversial issues, with reference to specific pieces of evidence.

Sometime in the next few days (all going well), or maybe weeks (if not so well), I will go back through the entire project, replacing ‘CoSpiracy’ with ‘CounterClaim’, and fixing any broken links etc. Watch this space.

Filed May 7th, 2016 under Uncategorized

Sorry to have to report this folks, but Quackwatch operator Stephen Barrett is a either a paid shill or a useful idiot. For example, on YouTube you can now watch the full version of a ‘Smoking Tooth’ video where a number of credible, scientifically-trained sources, demonstrate through scientific method, using a number of different experiments, that mercury dental amalgam fillings release mercury into the body in alarming quantities under normal conditions.

…and here is Barrett hand-waving away their points, using claims that are effectively debunked elsewhere in that same video, and endorsing a class of highly profitable products using classic PR language:

“The minor increase in exposure, which is considered trivial and without risk, is well worth the benefit of having strong, inexpensive, lasting dental restorations.

Compare that to this quote from Muriel Newman, former Member of Parliament for the corporatist ACT party:

“In fact, in a bizarre twist of fate, at a time when advocates of man-made global warming continue to push government policies to restrict energy use and the burning of fossil fuels in order to prevent ‘catastrophic’ warming, the world continues to cool….That is leading to increasing scepticism that the call to sacrifice living standards in order to “save the planet” is just political spin designed to persuade the public to accept green taxes.”

The underlying methodology is the same. Trivialize the problems, and exaggerate the benefits of continuing the practices that are profitable to the industries they are covering for. In Barrett’s case, the industries for whom mercury is a “co-product”  they can sell rather than a waste product they have to pay to dispose of safely, and the pharma companies who buy it, process it, and sell it to dentists. In Newman’s case, the oil industry and other greenhouse gas polluters.

He uses the same propaganda tactics as corporate front groups like Newman’s ‘NZ Centre for Political Research‘, covering up the logical fallacies in his arguments and evidence with scorn, mockery, and bullying. A classic example is calling people who disagree with him “anti-science”, a tactic pioneered in the 1980s by the tobacco industry, and used since in defence of everything from DDT to genetic engineering of non-human animals and food plants (”Genetically Modified Organisms” or “GMOs”).

Whether he is genuinely in the sway of corporatist propaganda, or accepting money to pretend he is, is neither here nor there. Barrett is a “skeptic” about the health harms of mercury amalgam (and water fluoridation and all sorts of others profitable toxics), in the same way that Ian Plimer is a “skeptic” about climate change.

Filed January 21st, 2016 under Uncategorized

I’ve been looking for a better name for the ‘Drilling for Truth’ project for a while now. Although “drilling for truth” is an accurate enough description of what this project is about, it’s very similar to the name of TruthDig, and such a common phrase in online journalism it’s become something of a cliche.

CoSpiracy is, of course, a pun on “conspiracy”. It implies (I hope) a Cooperative (and Constructive) approach to investigating conSpiracy theories, or more specifically, controversial topics which are often the subject of them. I’ve spent a good chunk of today going through all the pages in this project, updating them with the new name, and tidying up various other things (fixing broken links etc).

Another major change is that, as of today, I’m (re)licensing the CoSpiracy project under version 4.0 of the CreativeCommons-Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA 4.0). One of the major changes with version 4.0 of the licenses is that the licenses have been thoroughly internationalized, so the country-specific versions - like the version 3.0 NZ license I originally applied to (what was then) Drilling for Truth - have been discontinued. Although older versions of CC licenses continue to apply forever unless the copyright owner decides to change to a newer version, the version 4.0 licenses are a major upgrade, and with the renaming of the project, it feels like a good time to move to a new, internationalized license.

Plus, as the sole contributor so far, I don’t need anyone else to agree to a license change, something that gets complicated when a wiki project has a lot of contributors who all retain copyright to their own work. Wikipedia had to hold a massive election before they could decide whether to stay with its original license, the GNU FDL (Free Documentation License), or dual-license with the very similar, but more common, CC-BY-SA. Another project which relicensed from the GNU FDL is, the UK version of, who I just noticed switched to a CC license in 2013. At this stage it’s hard to tell which one, as the license statement at the bottom of the page (CC-BY-SA) is a different license from the one indicated by the license graphic (CC-NC-SA), which in turn is a different license from where the link is pointing (CC-BY-NC). I will email them today, pointing this out, and encouraging them to use the same license as SourceWatch, and our own ‘Who Said It?’ pages, so we easily copy and build on each others’ research.

Filed August 20th, 2015 under Uncategorized

As David Graeber explains in his book ‘The Democracy Project‘, the word democracy is used to mean two very different things; a system of government where representatives gain a mandate to rule an area by being elected by popular vote, and a system where everyone directly participates in making decisions which affect their lives. Representative government, in practice is often less democracy than ‘technocracy’, the idea that an educated elite, with specialist knowledge of science and technology, can make better decisions for the benefit of the public than the public themselves. Technocracy is essentially the same as theocracy, just with science used as justification in place of religion.

This month, Water New Zealand issued a press release about water fluoridation, in which CEO John Pfahlert claimed that because “the science is settled” the government should make a law obliging councils to fluoridate all public water supplies. This is classic technocracy. Even accepting Pfahlert’s claims about the science at face value, what he ignores is that just as people can choose to eat unhealthy food, or smoke, or drive cars (all of which kill a *lot* of people unlike dental cavities), they can also legitimately choose not to fluoridate their drinking water.

At present, each city and district council makes this decision for the water supplies it manages, which allows the communities who drink that water a much greater influence over whether it should be fluoridated than they would if it was mandated by central government. Whether or not you agree with Water New Zealand isn’t just about whether you are pro, anti, or on the fence about the pros and cons of fluoridation. In some ways, it’s more about whether you support parliaments centralizing decision-making power, and reducing people’s ability to participate in decisions that affect their lives.

There are a number of things about the pro-fluoride campaign that make me profoundly uncomfortable. One is Ken Perrott, a retired fertilizer chemist whose prolific writing on fluoridation is about as neutral as retired petroleum geologist Ian Plimer’s writing on climate change. Another is the sock puppets, with names like “Cedric Katesby” and “Debz Whipple Chris Price“, who pop up wherever the subject of fluoridation is being discussed online to reiterate one of a handful of empty rhetorical claims, laced with heavy doses of scorn and mockery. The most common of their claims are:

  • fluoride is a naturally occurring element
  • there is no evidence of harm to humans from fluoride dissolved in water at concentrations under 2ppm (part per million)
  • the science is settled, and water fluoridation is normal
  • therefore, opposing fluoridation is a form of “science denialism” and anti-fluoridationists are “anti-science
  • questioning the science of fluoridation is akin to questioning the scientific consensus on climate change, or arguing that the Earth is flat
  • for these reasons, the public should pay not attention to activists groups who oppose fluoridation

The more I see them, the more the constant chanting of these mantra starts to look suspiciously like the sort of key messages cooked up by the Hollow Men and their PR strategists. What these claims distort or ignore is:

  • As clarified on the D4T page on fluoride, fluorine is an element, whereas fluorides are compounds containing fluorine. While some fluorides occur naturally, pro-fluoridationist have publicly admitted that the fluoride compounds used in water fluoridation schemes are industrial byproducts. An Official Information Act request I made through shows some chemicals used in fluoridation are made by fertilizer companies, and when independently tested, contained a number of dangerous elements which are bioaccumulative (they build up in the body over time and can’t be eliminated), and therefore dangerous at *any* level.
  • Focusing on a claimed lack of evidence of harm when fluoride levels in water are under 2ppm cleverly avoids discussing the well known, and serious human harm caused by levels higher than 2ppm.
  • The science on fluoridation is far from settled. Epidemiologist Ben Goldacre, in his ‘Bad Science’ column in the Guardian, said, “the reality is that anybody making any confident statement about fluoride – positive or negative – is speaking way beyond the evidence“. Highly esteemed science reviewers the Cochrane Collaboration recently put out a detailed review of the scientific literature on fluoride which stated that much of the research on fluoridation uses flawed methodology, or has an obvious bias, or both. What these highly respected scientists are saying, is that the evidence for benefits is far from clear, which makes any potential risk to public health hard to justify.
  • Once the “science is settled” claim is debunked, the “anti-science” trope and the parallels with climate change don’t stick, and the rest of the house of cards just falls to pieces.

Most importantly, all of these claims about “The Science TM” carefully avoid addressing the ethical objections I mentioned last time fluoridation came up in this blog. The ethical aspect was addressed by Perrot and Price, along with one David Fierstien, when they set up accounts on FYI specifically to troll an anti-fluoridationist who had made an (admittedly poorly worded) OIA request. What their argument boils down to is that because fluoridation chemicals are not “drugs”, making people drink them in their water to prevent dental disease is not a “medical” treatment, so medical ethics involving the need for informed consent from patients don’t apply. This is a clever argument too, because it appears to address this issue, but it’s painfully self-contradictory. Giving people a substance (”drug” or not) to prevent disease is, by definition, a medical treament. Medical ethics apply. On that basis alone, I agree with Water NZ that the government should make a law about water fluoridation - one that bans it.

Filed August 12th, 2015 under Uncategorized
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