Scientist Bullied by Harvard Colleagues Wins Work & Integrity Award
The International Society for Children’s Health and the Environment (ISCHE) has awarded Philippe Grandjean, MD, DMSc, the Herbert Needleman Award in Children’s Environmental Health “for his work on methyl mercury, lead, PFAS and other toxic chemicals.”
One of the chemicals Dr. Grandjean has been studying for decades is fluoride, including the impact of low-levels of fluoride on the developing brain. He was also an expert witness called to testify at our federal lawsuit against the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to end fluoridation due to neurotoxicity.
The ISCHE is a non-profit society of children’s environmental health professionals, including epidemiologists, chemists, toxicologists, and clinicians. The Needleman award is given annually to scientist-advocates who perform important research in children’s environmental health, whose work significantly contributes to the enactment of policies and practices that protect children from toxic chemicals, and who pursue their research in the face of strong opposition.
Dr Grandjean is a physician, a scientist, an internationally known expert in environmental epidemiology, an author, and a professor at both Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Southern Denmark. He has held grants and/or consulted with the EPA itself, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the World Health Organization, and numerous other bodies over 25 years. He is the author or co-author of some 500 scientific papers.
He is perhaps best known worldwide for his research on the neurotoxicity of mercury, which involved studying the IQ of children born to mothers whose diet was high in fish consumption (and thence high in mercury). This work led to defining the EPA’s safe regulatory levels for mercury in the diet, and inspired downward revisions of methyl mercury exposure limits internationally. He’s seen similar results recently to his groundbreaking work on perfluorinated alkylate substances (PFASs).
Work on Fluoride
Since the 1980s, Dr. Grandjean has been studying the effects of fluoride. It began at the suggestion of Irving Selikoff (Selikoff was the founder of the Environmental and Occupational Health Division of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, and is known as the “father” of asbestos research), when he looked into the health effects of cryolite on workers (cryolite is a mineral containing fluoride, used in the manufacture of aluminum and approved for use as a pesticide on vegetables and fruits). Not only did the exposed workers have the expected symptoms of skeletal fluorosis, but they exhibited other health problems including neurological symptoms.
In regard to fluoridation, Dr. Grandjean’s name came into prominence when he published a meta-analysis of 27 fluoride-IQ studies, which found – even though they were conducted in many different geographical areas, by different research teams over a period of about 20 years – a remarkably consistent result (Choi et al., 2012). Of these 27 studies, 26 found a lowering of IQ in the children with higher fluoride exposure.
Since his work in 2012, Dr. Grandjean has authored or co-authored additional studies and reviews on fluoride’s neurotoxicity, including (Choi et al., 2014), his updated review on fluoride neurotoxicity (Grandjean, 2019) and the first benchmark dose analysis on fetal fluoride exposure (Grandjean et al., 2021), which found that a maternal urine fluoride concentration of 0.2mg/L, which studies show is exceeded 4 to 5 times in pregnant women living in fluoridated communities (Uyghurturk et al., 2020 / Till et al., 2018), was enough to lower IQ by 1 point.
Standing Up To Those Who Oppose Efforts to Protect The Vulnerable
The Needleman award was created to honor the memory of the late Herbert L Needleman, MD, who was a pediatrician and scientist who conducted groundbreaking research that led to fundamental changes in policy to prevent childhood lead poisoning despite fierce attacks by the lead industry and bureaucratic inertia from government. Like Needleman, Dr. Grandjean has opposition to his work on fluoridation from the dental industry and industry-captured public health officials. An example I’d like to share comes from cross-examination during our TSCA lawsuit against the EPA, where Dr. Grandjean was one of the world-renowned experts the Fluoride Action Network’s attorneys called to testify on the science linking fluoridation to fetal neurotoxicity.
**As a side note, the EPA’s key expert witness, brought to defend the safety of fluoridation chemicals, had a very different background. She had previosly defended the safety of glyphosate for Monsanto, Agent Orange for Dow Chemical, PFOAs for 3M, and pesticides for Syngenta and Croplife.
Dr. Grandjean testified during our TSCA trial that he was threatened by colleagues and administrators at Harvard University to retract his 2012 conclusions of neurotoxicity from fluoride exposure. As a person with integrity, he defied these threats:
“Well if you want the whole story, I was asked to meet with a professor from Harvard’s Dental School. He came to my office and essentially threatened me. He said I was endangering public health, and he demanded that I issue a statement similar to what you’re talking about now.
When I said that I would think it over, he went to the Deans of the medical school, the dental school, and the school of public health -that is my boss – without telling me, and the Deans did not know what was going on. They were just asked to sign a statement saying, in agreement with CDC that fluoridation is the cornerstone of modern public health. And so this way, the press office of Harvard school of public health said to me, we better issue a statement because the article we just published in a journal called Harvard Public Health has resulted in the largest number of letters from readers, mainly dentists – that is fluoridation proponents, including this professor/colleague from Harvard’s dental school – who demanded that Harvard retract the results of my study.
And I said ‘hey, my study, I can’t retract that, I can’t retract the conclusions.’ But I was then presented with the wording that you’re just referring to. So this is not my wording. It is an attempt to calm the tempers of the fluoridation proponents in the U.S.”
As Dr. Grandjean describes at the end of his statement, his name was added to a Harvard document intended to show support for the safety of fluoridation; essentially refuting his own study’s findings. However, Dr. Grandjean stuck to his guns, never signed the document, and later published a press release calling for fluoride levels in water to be lowered “right away.” The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health published the press release, quoting Grandjean:
“Just because we did studies over the last 70 years, it doesn’t mean that we did everything that is necessary to know for sure that fluoridation is not toxic to some processes in the body or development of the brain. Those studies have actually not been done.
I’ve worked in this field long enough to know that with time, we have found that lead, mercury, and pesticides were more toxic than we originally thought. I am not willing to sit here and say, okay, let’s expose the next generation’s brains and just hope for the best.”
The conclusions of Dr. Grandjean’s 2012 study, that fluoride is a neurotoxic risk to children, have since been bolstered by later studies showing the same risk (including Bashash et al,. 2017, Thomas et al., 2018, Bashash et al., 2018, Green et al. 2019, Till 2020, Cantoral, 2021, Goodman, 2022).
More at fluoridealert.org
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Jerry Krause
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Hi PSI Readers,
This comment refers to a chemistry textbook titled Chemistry For Changing Times by John W. Hill first published in 1972, the year before I became a chemistry instructor in a small community college in northern Minnesota. So, I am personally well aware of this textbook’s history.
Initially, it was not well received by the chemical education community because in certain ways it seemed too elementary. That attitude of the chemical education community slowly changed as documented by the fact I will quote from the author’s preface of the book’s 6th Edition, 1992. Which quote I know as been repeated each edition since the first.
“Changing Times. We live in a world of increasing rapid change. It has been said that the only constant is change itself. At present, we are facing some of the greatest problems that humans have ever encountered, and the dilemmas with which we are now confronted seem to have no perfect solutions. We are sometimes forced to make a best choice among only bad alternatives, and out decisions often provide only temporary solutions to our problems. Nevertheless, if we are to choose properly we must understand what out choices are. Mistakes can be costly, and they cannot alway be rectified. It is easy to pollute, but cleaning pollution once it is there is enormously expensive. We can best avoid mistakes by collecting as much information as possible before making making critical decisions. Science is a means of gathering and evaluating information, and chemistry is central to all the sciences.”
I now quote from this aitical: “Well if you want the whole story, I was asked to meet with a professor from Harvard’s Dental School. He came to my office and essentially threatened me. He said I was endangering public health, and he demanded that I issue a statement similar to what you’re talking about now.”
What you do not read in this article is why a professor from Harvard’s Dental School threatened Dr Grandjean. You, a Reader , are not told what the fluoridation issue might be relative to the practice of dentistry.
And Professor Grandjean does not refer to how a person’s IQ is so critically important to a person’s positive productivity during his/her lifetime. Based upon my previous lifetime experiences (I will be 82 in a few days), I must conclude that Professor Grandjean , and those who awarded him the Herbert Needleman Award, have a terrible case of “tunnel vision”.
Have a good day, Jerry
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Gerard
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I have one major issue that has become stuck in my throat, that is the lack (esp. in the U.K), of any campaign organisation set up to help the victims of clinical dental fluoride treatment. There are anti-water fluoridation campaigns but nothing for us.
I am much concerned by this and will (if I cannot find a suitable group to work with), endeavour to set one up myself, the object being to bring a class action against the perpetrators of this monstrous crime. I am hugely under resourced, surviving only on state benefits which are under regular threat as my status is near constantly under review, not an uncommon experience in modern Britain but made worse for me as the cause of my conditions (although I have oft stated my belief to my physicians that fluoride is the root cause of what ails me), is not recognised and, therefore, has never been formally diagnosed. This is another reason we need a campaign group to support victims, for without a diagnosis they are adrift on an angry sea. I’m 56 now and have been coping with the effects of my exposure since well before adulthood. Some of my friends may well remark that it is near a miracle I’m still doing so (I have a case re: asbestos exposure before the unitary authority that is my landlord -as I write-, and even this came about partly as a result of my -fluoride induced-, cognitive impairment).
I am a community shareholder in a local resource centre/health food retailer/book shop so premises, publicity and other resources are to hand and I am, therefore, in earnest regarding the necessity of setting up a campaign group capable of supporting victims. If you can refer me to organisations, resources and/or people capable of supporting this venture please do so. Once established there will be the need for speakers on the subject and networking with other similar organisations. Thank you.
regards Gerard Hales
Pls. also see https://twitter.com/Williamtheb/status/1614565557717667841 for all prev. posts re; #Fluoride #Arafel and: https://www.arafel.co.uk/2022/11/whats-in-your-waterproofs.html
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Julian Bohan
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The Fluoride Index is an historical resource for people who want to approach fluoride on a subject-by-subject basis. It could be air pollution, dental fluorosis, or suppression of evidence – you’ll find it here http://nfl.si/fi.
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