Correction: The Joseph Mercola piece on fluoride first appeared in January. Last week was when I first learned he was a regular blogger for the Huffington Post, which in itself seemed worth a Tracker entry.
One of the things I like and will miss about newspapers is the systematic way they separate news and features from op-ed pieces. And while the op-ed pages give people a voice, they were distinct from the stories gathered by staff writers who were paid not to voice their opinions but to go out and check into things. And if you had an agenda or something you wanted to sell, you could pay to take out an ad.
Enter The Huffington Post, which featured this offering by Joseph Mercola: Harvard Study Confirms Fluoride Reduces Children’s IQ.
I first came across Mercola – apparently medical doctor – a few years ago when someone started sending me spam emails promoting his medical advice. Mercola has advocated various forms of alternative medicine – homeopathy, acupuncture and the like, and he speaks out against vaccines, GMOs and just about anything associated with industry or the medical establishment. His emails looked like a good source of claims that called out for critical reporting.
Now Mercola is writing for the Huffington Post – not taking out ads – and his story on fluoride suggested that fluoridated drinking water could cause all kinds of mischief:
Studies have shown that fluoride toxicity can lead to a wide variety of health problems, including:
• Increased lead absorption
• Disrupts synthesis of collagen
• Hyperactivity and/or lethargy
• Muscle disorders
• Thyroid disease
• Arthritis
• Dementia
• Bone fractures
• Lowered thyroid function
• Bone cancer (osteosarcoma)
• Inactivates 62 enzymes and inhibits more than 100
• Inhibited formation of antibodies
• Genetic damage and cell death
• Increased tumor and cancer rate
• Disrupted immune system
• Damaged sperm and increased infertility
Are a couple of lost IQ points really going to matter if you’re riddled with cancer, your bones are dissolving, your cells are dying, your enzymes have pooped out and you’ve got dementia?
Mercola's piece reads like an advertisement but it appears to be part of the editorial content. One obvious problem is that the story never says how much fluoride you need to ingest before there’s any evidence of the above adverse effects. Readers might reasonably assume these various maladies can result from the amount of fluoride typically ingested from drinking tap water. Well, that doesn’t seem to be anything close to what those people at Harvard are saying.
The study to which he refers is a meta-analysis on fluoride that came out of the Harvard School of Public Health last year. The researchers examined a number of studies, mostly from China, where some people have been exposed to very high levels of fluoride. It seems worthy scientific goal to examine these studies and use them to get some handle on the safe upper limits for fluoride. If we’re going to continue to put it in the water supply, it seems like a good idea to know how much is dangerous. But the studies did not reveal, let alone “confirm” that the amount of fluoride in U.S. tap water has any influence on IQ.
At Slate, Melinda Wenner Moyer offers this counterpoint to Mercola. There’s a lot of interesting information in this piece, especially about Dr. Mercola’s fluoride-free toothpaste and other potential conflicts of interest. The piece also included some perspective about how little the scientific community knows about fluoride. The headline, Does Fluoride Make Your Kid Dumb? kind of fans the flame the piece is purportedly putting out. I’m sure it got a lot of clicks, but the piece never quite answers the question.
The news here is the fact that Mercola got to scare people in the Huffington Post. The Harvard Study came out almost a year ago. An excellent treatment of that appeared last September in a story by Dion Lefler in the Wichitaw Eagle headlined, Data on Fluoride, IQ not Applicable in U.S. The story explains the Harvard Study, its limitations, and how it’s been used by various factions in a local controversy over fluoridating water. How refreshing to see a headline that encapsulate the news. And the writer avoids false balance by entitling people to their own opinions, fears, concerns and uncertainties but not their own facts.
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