Fluoride NTP report is Fluff

Epidemiology is the lowest level of scientific endeavour and the "Systematic Review" employs the disastrous confidence trick of the Evidence Pyramid.

I am pleased to find I am not alone when I say the Emperor has no Clothes when it comes to assessing "Systematic Reviews" which generally relate to Harms caused by chemical pollution, drugs or jabs.

Found this nice simple illustration¹ of what we need to do.

Turn the Evidence Pyramid on its head

Many people won’t know what I am on about, so here is a nice collection² of Evidence Pyramids or Triangles that are used by Epidemiologists employed by vested interests to discount the actual molecular level understanding of toxicology and reduce the amount of reading and thinking they are paid to do.

Fluff from the US National Toxicology Program

The latest newsworthy example of abuse of the review process is the long awaited Final Draft of the US taxpayer funded National Toxicology Program report into Fluoride Brain Damage that I briefly mentioned here.³

The front cover nicely illustrates Tea, Toothpaste and deliberately Poisoned Water are the major sources of Fluoride intoxication of Billions of Humans.

Fetuses mentioned only 8 times

The report concludes that the Brain of the Fetus is damaged by the Mother’s Fluoride intake crossing the Placenta.

One might think the Fetus would be the focus of the report but the NTP authors make sure the word appears only 8 times, mainly in the few references they let through their exclusion net. The words Fetal and Embryonic appear only once each.

They bury what I have said is the single most important proof of Human Fetal Brain Damage caused by Fluoride, namely the paper published originally in Chinese⁴ in 1996 and in English⁵ in 2008 directly measuring the poison and relating it to altered Neurotransmitters.

Bias mentioned 1,256 times

From the beginning of the compilation of the NTP Fluoride “monograph”, published in 2016 with a “systematic literature review on the effects of fluoride on learning and memory in animals only”, the authors had to overcome their Cognitive Dissonance as the enormity of the Fluoride Toxicology knowledge base directly relating to Humans hit them.

They systematically set about finding ways to “exclude” Science from their report and just loved to refer to similar reductive “Systematic Reviews”.

Trying to justify ignoring the brilliant research done to understand Fluoride toxicity at the molecular and enzyme active site level, they employed a team of people to initially reject papers published in languages other than english (waited until 2020 to reverse that decision after numerous people, including myself ridiculed them), then created a “Risk-of-bias Heatmap for High Risk-of-bias Human Neurodevelopmental or Cognitive Studies Following Fluoride Exposure”. This was most frequently done after no more than the Abstract had been read after a computer-assisted and not very intelligent search of PubMed and some other limited resources.

A Table outlining the drafting and reviewing process from July 2016 to May 2023 appears on page 153 of the report that you can download for free.⁶

Thayer Conflict of Interest

Kristina Thayer was the key driver of the Draft NTP report and has now moved to the USEPA to defend them against the FAN prosecution being heard by Judge Chen of the US Federal Circuit Court sitting in California.

Her specific role was “Conducted literature screening”. She has published 4 papers on methods of screening, aka, culling the Science.

Here is a slide from her 2020 internal NTP presentation on epigenetics of Harms :

Note other projects the NTP was looking at, including PFAS (PFOS and PFOA), BPA, Occupational Exposure to Cancer Therapy Drugs, Folic Acid, Traffic-related Air Pollution, Shift Work, Light at Night, Circadian Disruption and Transgenerational Inheritance Epigenetics.

Passing over Mechanisms

The NTP Fluff approach to Human Brain Damage is summarized in their own weasel words:

The intent was not to develop a mechanism for fluoride induction of effects on learning and memory but to evaluate whether a plausible series of mechanistic events exists to support effects observed in the low-dose region (below approximate drinking-water-equivalent concentrations of 20 ppm for animal studies) that may strengthen a hazard conclusion if one is derived.

I do hope the next President of the United States employs someone to clean out the public services including USEPA, CDC, FDA.

Why did Thayer and her Chums Ignore the CTD ?

The NTP Fluoride monograph does not mention even the existence of the fabulous US taxpayer funded resource of the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database, let alone the rich collection of curated Toxic Pathways.⁷

I wonder if anyone told Judge Chen about that?

1. https://markgibsonphysio.com/2015/06/09/the-inverted-pyramid/

2. https://laikaspoetnik.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/pyramids.png

3.

4. Yu YN, Yang WX, Dong Z, Wan CW, Zhang JT, Liu JL, Xiao KQ, Huang YS, Lu BF. 1996. [Neurotransmitter and receptor changes in the brains of fetuses from areas of endemic fluorosis]. Chin J Endemiol. 15(5):257-259.

5. Yu YN, Yang WX, Dong Z, Wan CW, Zhang JT, Liu JL, Xiao KQ, Huang YS, Lu BF. 2008. Neurotransmitter and receptor changes in the brains of fetuses from areas of endemic fluorosis. Fluoride. 41(2):134-138.

6. https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/fluoride_final_508.pdf

7. https://ctdbase.org/detail.go?type=chem&acc=D012969&view=pathway