I’m working through an article sent to me and seem to keep running into problems verifying items in the article. Studies listed, Organizations, it’s all very hard to pin down.
The article sent to me was this:
And the section I’m working on is:
*"Dr. William Marcus, believes that a study conducted by Battelle for the National Toxicology Program on the toxicology of fluoride shows that there were dose-related increases in bone cancer in male rats. Dr. Marcus also questions the removal by peer reviewers of cancers at other sites in the rats as well. Especially worrisome to Dr. Marcus is the fact that that levels of fluoride that caused the cancers in the rats were lower than those seen in humans who ingested lower amounts, but for a longer period. These levels are generated because fluoride is accumulated in the body and is not secreted.
Dr. Marcus was formerly the chief toxicologist for the EPA’s Office of Drinking Water, but was fired in 1991 after insisting that an unbiased evaluation of fluoride’s cancer potential be conducted. Marcus fought his dismissal, and was able to be reinstated after demonstrating in court that it was politically motivated."
*
Can anyone help me track down any proof of this? Was he fired for ‘blowing the whistle on fluoride’?
The only sites mentioning him are quackery type anti-fluoride sites.
Which has a link to this case: http://www.kkc.com/files/96caa03a.htm
Granted, I am not in any way familiar with the law, but reading through it seems to…back up the article?
I searched at the EPA’s website for his name and found a letter about him, but it seemed to be a complaint in the line of anti-fluoride conspiracy stuff.
As you noted, this (now 19-year-old?) legal case is hard to pin down, partly because the sites still going on about it all seem to be repositories of anti-fluoride nuttery.
Assuming for the sake of argument that Marcus was fired for going public with his claims about fluoride hazards and embarassing the EPA and that he deserved to win a settlement from the government, what would this tell us, beyond the fact that government agencies and businesses in general don’t like employees going outside channels and often treat “whistleblowers” harshly?
After all this time has passed, have any compelling studies emerged to back up the claim that drinking fluoridated water gives you cancer? Nope. Have any of the dread risks promoted by the anti-fluoridation crowd been demonstrated to occur? Nope.
The only development that gives any comfort at all to these people is that there is a new federal recommendation that (taking into account the use of fluoride additives in toothpaste, beverages etc.) municipalities lower the amount of fluoride added to water as a precaution against tooth staining, a minor cosmetic problem in a small number of people. This is pretty small potatoes though when you’ve been frothing about imminent catastrophe for years and years.
So that’s my point. Has Marcus been vindicated in the sense that water fluoridation has been shown to be carcinogenic? Or has he devolved into just another component of the anti-fluoridationists’ campaign, participating in interviews with quackery-promoters like Gary Null which get posted on nutters’ websites?
Funny how you single out Gary Null as being anti-fluoride, but you somehow neglect to mention the 14 Nobel Prize winners who have also expressed doubts/reservations about fluoridation:
Maybe not as many as you think-check out the dates on most of those concerned about fluoride. How many of them had current information on the subject?
Hell, how many of them are still alive?
And funny how almost all these Nobel winners were awarded their prizes before 1960.
As for the lone exception, Carlsson is also largely concerned with the ethics of treating populations instead of tailored individual care and most of his thoughts on the subject are also decades old. His own Nobel work (as the case with most winners) was conducted decades ago.
She has good intentions. But, yeah, she sent me a multi-exclamation point email Monday worried about the fluoride poison I’m putting in my body. It’s all a big circle of ‘she’s concerned about me, but if I want to poison myself it’s my body’, and yeah, that’s not condescending at all…and we’ve been at it ever since…
She sent me the about.com link and just wants me to ‘think about it’, but my way of thinking about it is to immediately start googling each quote and study.
When I’m looking up these studies…it’s like this big circle jerk as each webiste is an anti-fluoride website and they ALL list the same studies (in one case I couldn’t even find an actual study, but they all listed that study as one of their source cites. Bleah.)
Yes, it’s “funny”, isn’t it? How “odd” that I mentioned “Gary Null”, who happens to be the guy listed on the site you reference as being the “interviewer” of William Marcus, the subject of the “OP”. Pretty damn peculiar, “isn’t it”?
Apart from the fact that nearly all those Nobel winners who supposedly have had doubts about fluoridation are either ancient or dead and therefore limited in their ability to comment on the current state of knowledge about water fluoridation, there’s the unsettling evidence of numerous Nobel winners who’ve gone off the rails and espoused quackery, especially when straying outside their fields of expertise.
This is not to say that a Nobel award winner’s opinions should be dismissed out of hand, but it helps if they know the area on which they’re expounding and have relevant evidence to offer.
My point was not to make an appeal to authority by citing Nobel laureates. My point was that your implication that some viewpoint is necessarily false because some supporter of it (who you’ve no doubt cherry-picked) is part of a some other group that practices something you deem to be “pseudoscience”/“nutter”/“quackery” is just plain lame. Doesn’t prove anything.
Do I really need to explain to you again why I mentioned Null? I suggest reading my last post. Or reread your own post, which quotes me.
By the way, it is a very well-known and shopworn tactic among supporters of health quackery to cite lists of people who share their beliefs, or supportive quotes from supposed experts, as an appeal to authority and/or numbers. When the lists are examined, the people on them rarely have expertise in the field in question and commonly work in practices laden with woo. Quotes typically are taken out of context, come from people who are unqualified to weigh in or the quotes are ancient and no longer relevant to the current state of knowledge.
When a preventative medicine program has had outstanding success, is backed by sound evidence and has the support of the overwhelming majority of health professionals knowledgeable in the field, then I do tend to look skeptically on relatively tiny numbers of fringe practitioners and others who wave their arms about undocumented hazards, even if they happen to be Nobel winners from long, long ago.
And yes, when you see the names Gary Null, Joe Mercola, Mike Adams and similar notorious quackery promoters lining up to denounce something, red flags should go up. (All of them are heavily anti-fluoridation, when they’re not gunning for vaccines or some other useful facet of medicine, or promoting unproven/useless supplements and therapies).
If you can come up with evidence that water fluoridation causes cancer OMIGOD, feel free to present it.
I disagree. I’ve said it before about others and I’ll say it again here about Gary Null and Joe Mercola. If they tell you the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, run toward the sunrise in the west.
They may be examples of the stopped clock that is right twice a day and they may accidentally be found saying something that is true. However, without all the resources and time in the world to confirm that, assuming that anything they say and take a stand on is wrong and is the opposite of current scientific knowledge is an excellent bet. Would I bet my life on it? You bet.
It may be that you and others don’t recognize certain names as being so steeped in crackery and woo that they every statement is automatically suspect. There’s no reason to expect this; few people have the time to research this to a significant degree. But some people here and elsewhere have done the research (as I have, although on a limited number of fields). Some names are so notorious that they keep popping up in any discussion of medical woo. Gary Null’s name didn’t appear casually. He’s been called one of the nation’s leading promoters of dubious treatment for serious disease. You can’t defend him without losing your own credibility.
And yet, he does have defenders, to an appalling degree. From the bottom of that linked page:
It’s not realy our business, but …
Just don’t bother with this.
If she believes this stuff, any rational explanations you provide will not change her belief (because it’s not based on rational thinking, but emotional/psychological needs). And any discussions on this can easily break down into arguments and hard feelings between you and your sister. So don’t.
Just accept your sister’s belief in this as an eccentric part of who she is, and continue to love her despite it.
At most, just respond saying “I got your email. Thanks for your concern for me.”
And Marcus was fired in 1991. So was the EPA firing Marcus for criticizing a practice that was in place before EPA even existed? Was he fired for bringing to light a conspiracy of notorious Trilateral Commission member and alleged supporter of one-world dictatorship George H.W. Bush?
Or could it be that Marcus didn’t exhibit the necessary detachment you’d want from a chief toxicologist when it came to the issue of flouride?
(Sorry for the bump, as I’m now back from the weekend.) Well, from having glanced through the court case, Marcus was an interesting person - I remember a paragraph listing the fact that he would have to meet with his supervisor at a local McDonald’s because his allergies prevented him from meeting at EPA Headquarters. I would think Mcdonald’s would be a cause of allergic reaction.
You probably have the correct take on this, and I am going to try doing this in the future.
Arguments with her **have ** caused me take a good look at myself. There are a few issues that I’ve realized that I am reacting to emotionally and can improve on.
