By A.J. Cahill
Summary: An Australian physician writes to a medical journal warning of the dangers of fluoridating water supplies, giving examples from his own practice and from other doctors’ practices of “the evil effects on human health” as a result of sodium fluoride being added to public water. He ends by offering advice about dental health that is just as astute today as it was then. “Sound nutrition is the only sure and safe way to provide our children with sound teeth and sound health for the rest of their lives. All mothers must now learn to feed their families on a well-balanced, vitamin-rich diet in order to achieve the best results. They must stop buying devitalized white bread and over-refined white sugar—those two curses of our modern civilization—and replace them with nourishing whole-meal bread and delicious health-giving honey.” From the Medical Journal of Australia, 1962. Reprinted by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.
[The following is a transcription of the original Archives document. To view or download the original document, click here.]
Fluoridation of Water Supplies
From the Correspondence section of the Medical Journal of Australia, June 2, 1962.
Sir:
I am a graduate of the University of Melbourne and am now living in retirement after practicing as an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist here in Canberra, the national capital of Australia, for over twenty-five years. Since I retired from active practice ten years ago, I have made a deep study of the evil effects on human health that are caused by adding artificial sodium fluoride to public water supplies. Here are some relevant facts that I have learned about fluoridation and its many dangers:
1. Sir Stanton Hicks, former Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Adelaide, in an ABC broadcast in May 1955, emphasized that sodium fluoride, when added to water supplies even in solution of one part of fluorine to a million parts of water, is a highly toxic, cumulative poison that is stored up in the brain and all other vital organs inside the human body, year after year, and for which there is no known antidote.
2. Dr. Leo Spira, MD, in active practice in Vienna, reported five years ago that large numbers of his patients who had been drinking, bathing in, and cooking with fluoride water for a period of ten years now had yellow, brown, and even black teeth (fluorosis); hardening of their eardrums and incurable deafness; and exophthalmic goiter, in an area where goiter was unknown prior to the addition of sodium fluoride to the water supplies. They also had advanced arteriosclerosis of all their arteries—including the vital coronary arteries supplying blood to the walls of the heart itself—that led to sudden death from coronary occlusion in their heart.
3. Dr. Max Gunn, DDS, chief dental consultant at the large Worcester Hospital, Boston, USA, writing in Harper’s Magazine two years ago, gave full details of the evil effects on human health that are caused by adding artificial sodium fluoride to town water supplies, and he ended his article with the arresting statement that fluoridation may well prove to be the most colossal blunder of the present century.
4. The minister of health in the province of Ontario, Canada, Dr. Dymond, MD, has stated that fluoride is the introduction of a substance into the water supply of all—for the purpose of preventing a disease neither water-borne nor communicable—for the benefit of [but] one section of the population. “If this principle is admitted…we have opened a door that the province might never be able to close” (mass medication).
5. The antifluoridation campaign—started three years ago by 500 leading doctors, dentists, and scientists in the USA—has now become worldwide, and by the end of 1960, 1200 local councils had completely stopped the health-destroying practice of adding sodium fluoride to their town water supplies.
Sound nutrition is the only sure and safe way to provide our children with sound teeth and sound health for the rest of their lives. All mothers must now learn to feed their families on a well-balanced, vitamin-rich diet in order to achieve the best results. They must stop buying devitalized white bread and overrefined white sugar—those two curses of our modern civilization—and replace them with nourishing, whole-meal bread and delicious, health-giving honey. Instead of drinking injurious cups of tea before breakfast each morning, both parents and children should have a health-giving [fresh] orange drink.
Delicious fruit and vegetable salads should be taken at least once a day all the year round (the “salad way” to health).
All mothers should teach their children to clean their teeth properly by using the toothbrush up and down, both inside and out, each night and morning, and also to rinse their mouths out well with cold water after each meal and then eat a well-washed, juicy apple, which has been truly described as “Nature’s toothbrush.”
Yours, etc.,
A.J. Cahill
44 Torrens Street
Braddon, Canberra, A.C.T.
March 30, 1962
By A.J. Cahill. Reprinted from the Medical Journal of Australia, June 2, 1962, by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.
