The effects of fluoride on the thyroid gland.

• Author: Durrant-Peatfield, Barry

It has been known since the latter part of the 19th century that certain communities, notably in Argentina, India and Turkey, were chronically ill with premature aging, arthritis, mental retardation, and infertility; and high levels of natural fluorides in the water were responsible. Not only was it clear that the fluoride was having a general effect on the health of the community, but in the early 1920s Goldemberg working in Argentina showed that fluoride was displacing iodine, thus compounding the damage and rendering the community hypothyroid from iodine deficiency.

This was the basis of the research in the 1930s of May, Litzka, Gorlitzer and others, who used fluoride preparations to treat overactive thyroid illness.

Their patients either drank fluoridated water, swallowed fluoride pills or were bathed in fluoridated bath water, and their thyroid function was, as a result, greatly depressed. The use in 1937 of fluorotyrosine for this purpose showed how effective this treatment was, but the effectiveness was difficult to predict and many patients suffered total thyroid loss. So it was given a new role and received a new name, Pardinon. It was marketed not for overactive thyroid disease but as a pesticide.

While it is unlikely that it will be disputed that fluorides are toxic--let us be reminded that they are Schedule 2 Poisons under the Poisons Act 1972--the matter in dispute is the level of toxicity attributable to given amounts; in today's context, the degree of damage caused by given concentrations in the water supply. While admitting its toxicity, proponents rely on the fact that it is diluted and therefore, it is claimed, unlikely to have deleterious effects. They could not be more mistaken.

Fluoride is an enzyme poison. Enzymes are complex protein compounds that vastly speed up biological chemical reactions while themselves remaining unchanged. As we speak, there occurs in all of us a vast multitude of these reactions to maintain life and produce the energy to sustain it. The chains of amino acids that make up these complex proteins are linked by simple compounds called amides, and it is with these that fluorine molecules react, splitting and distorting them, thus damaging the enzymes and their activity. This effect can occur at extraordinarily low concentrations, even lower than the one part per million (1 ppm) which is the dilution proposed for fluoridation in our water supply.

Moreover, fluorides are cumulative and build up...