Good afternoon, Mayor and councilmembers. Next Wednesday morning, May 18, the Council’s Committee on Public Health and Human services will meet here in City Hall with representatives on both sides of the fluoridation debate for a "work session" That event could prove a historic turning point, if only you are willing to think outside the box and carefully consider the scientific information our experts will provide.

I urge you to place scientific evidence above cut-and-paste dogma. When you hear "safe and effective" ask yourselves how that can be so in the light of today’s evidence. When you hear "CDC best practices," remember that those are the same "best practices" that have resulted in fluorosis-disfigured teeth for approaching half of our young people today. (They call this mild).

                                         

True, endorsement by the CDC sounds impressive—at first. When we think of CDC, we picture its grandiose Atlanta headquarters and army of 15,000 employees. Well, scratch that. The CDC’s Division of Oral Health comprises about 28 dentist-bureaucrats without medical or toxological training, well rewarded to promote community fluoridation. They’re PR people, basically. That’s it.

And there’s strong resistance brewing in Atlanta, the CDC’s backyard. Atlanta is city of 540,000, 58% black. There, the African-American community is mobilizing against what was sold as a social entitlement but is now recognized as environmental racism.

Last month, Andrew Young—iconic MLK-era civil rights leader, former Atlanta mayor, former UN Ambassador, 3-time member of the U.S. House of Representative—and a dentist’s son—came out forcefully against fluoridation. Noting that cavities are rampant in inner cities that have been fluoridated for decades and that both cavity and fluorosis rates are higher among blacks, he said: —quote— "I am most deeply concerned for poor families who have babies: if they cannot afford unfluoridated water for their babies’ milk formula, do their babies not count?... This is an issue of fairness, civil rights, and compassion."

Two days ago, Martin Luther King’s daughter Bernice King issued an equally forthright statement calling for an end to the practice and for "Fluoridegate" investigations into the deception which has always surrounded it.

The cat’s out of the bag on this one, Council. People are waking up to the fact that fluoride is bad for you. It needs to go the way of the dodo, and soon. Thank you.