Subject: Re: Biological Effects of Fluorides? Fact or Fiction?

From: [email-masked] (Fransfrech)
Date: 29 Aug 1995 01:07:41 -0400

In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
(Steven B. Harris ) writes:

> For parents certainly don't know the product
>>prescribed by their doctors is the same product the USPHS describes as
>"a rodenticide, an insecticide, and a fungicide"--Sodium fluoride. (As
>a >mother, I swear I’d want to kill the guy who told me to feed my
>beloved >baby rat poison and didn't tell me that's what it was.)
>>
>
>  Frances, only the dose makes the poison.  Many more babies have died
>from taking their mothers' iron pills than have died from fluoride
>overdoses.  There is no point in labeling ANYTHING a "poison" without
>talking about the dose.
>
>   As for the idea that fluoride drops cause crib death, it ought to be
>simple enough to come up with at least a case control study showing
>that infants who died this way were more likely to have gotten such
>drops than matched case controls who died of something else, or were
>alive at the same age and doing fine.  Where is this study?  You can't
>just say that X and Y started about the same time and therefore must be
>related-- a lot of things have changed in the world since 1958  You
>could as well blame crib death on polio vaccine, and indeed I've seen
>this very argument.  Why don't you and the vaccine fanatics have a
>summit so you can decide how many of these crib deaths you want to
>divide up between yourselves for maximum political effect?
>
>       Nearly all SIDS researchers do agree on one point: That
>>unexplained infant deaths, now referred to as SIDS, have been rising
>since he late 1950s or early 1960s. That should be a clue worth
>pursuing, for these drops came on the market in 1958.
>
>     Doc, you never have responded to my challenge about the asthma
>>medication propellants. You said large amounts of Freon type gases
>could e inhaled without harm--so long as one was getting enough oxygen,
>and I pointed out that's the trouble, asthmatics aren't getting enough
>oxygen. You also didn't answer my question, Why are doctors so
>stubborn?
>
>    Comment: why are we so stubborn when people present us with
>chemically unlikely hypotheses?  Because we know some chemistry.  There
>isn't much Freon in a puff from an asthma inhaler, certainly not enough
>to displace any significant amount of air in your lungs.  How much gas
>do you think a dinky little bottle like that holds? An Azmacort inhaler
>gives you 20 grams or so of propellant (Freon-12) and 240 shots.  That
>means every puff delivers less than 1/12 gram of Freon.  A gram of
>Freon-12 is something like 300 ml of gas, and 1/12 of a gram is less
>than 30 cc of gas.  Your lung volumes are several thousand cc's, even
>during an asthma attack.  You figure out how much oxygen is displaced
>by Freon.
>
>                                             Steve Harris, M.D.

            My goal is to save lives. I presume that yours, as a
physician, is the same. But we seem to have got off on the wrong foot with
each other. Could we start over? Would it help if you knew that some of my
ideas have gained medical attention? I have, for example, been published
in the New England Journal of Medicine--a rather remarkable accomplishment
for a non-doctor. My thesis on Crohn’s disease attracted the interest of a
physician-professor at the University of Kansas School of Medicine. He
includes it among the theories he teaches. I have been invited to speak
(did speak!) at a meeting of health care workers at Shawnee-Mission
Medical Center, Kansas. The subject was fluoridation risks, with special
emphasis (by request!) On the possible link between aluminum fluoride and
Alzheimer's and silicofluoride and Crohn's disease. Benoit Bouchard
Minister of Health and Welfare in Canada, heard about my SIDS: theory
(through a Canadian woman who attended a conference where I spoke in
California) and asked for all of my research. He then invited me to