Fluoridegate: An American Tragedy (2013) - Documentary

In 2013 David Kennedy produced Fluoridegate: An American Tragedy, a classic documentary that is exquisite in capturing the battle that raged over the downgrading of cancers in the fluoride study overseen by the National Toxicology Program and published in 1990. Below we reprint the comments made by William Marcus, the senior toxicologist at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Drinking Water, on these downgrades. Also, we add the comments from Stephen Kohn of the National Whistleblowers Association who explained how the EPA went after Marcus with “a vengeance… like he was an enemy of the state.”

In 1977 the US Congress mandated the National Toxicology Program to conduct animal studies to determine if fluoride causes cancer. Battelle Columbus Laboratories were contracted to perform the studies that began in 1985 and ran for 2 years. In 1988 Battelle submitted their final report that included the finding of a dose-dependent increase of a rare liver cancer (hepatocholangiocarcinoma) in male & female mice and a small but statistically significant dose-related increase in osteosarcomas in male rats but not in the female rats.

For the rare liver cancer, the first scientist to describe this cancer said that Battelle made a correct diagnosis. However, this rare liver cancer was reclassified by a government review panel as a non-cancer and one of the osteosarcomas was downgraded leading to the classification of “equivocal evidence of cancer”. There were also increases in oral and thyroid cancers, but they were not considered statistically significant. 

RESOURCE: https://fluoridealert.org/content/bulletin_12-26-14/