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Anti-fluoride “expert” finds the real reason oral health has improved – and it’s not fluoride

Posted on November 15, 2017 | Leave a comment

Anti-fluoride campaigners always promote people like Geoff Pain as “renowned” or “world experts.” They aren’t. Pain has no credible scientific publications on fluoride.

No, in fact, he claims lead is responsible for tooth decay and the improvement in oral health is a result of removing airborne lead contamination. And the “proof” is even in the title of his report – “Global Decline in Tooth Decay correlates with reduced Airborne Lead (Pb) but water Fluoridation prevents further progress“

Mind you, the word “correlate” appears only twice in the document – once in the title and once in the abstract. Nowhere else. Scientists usually restrict the use of words like this to results of proper statistical analyses – but he presents no evidence of a correlation anywhere in the document.

OK, we shouldn’t expect any better. This document is just another one of a series of documents, dressed up as scientific publications, supported by cobbled together citations which are often are irrelevant or don’t support the claims made. Produced by Geoff Pain, well-known Australian anti-fluoride activist, whose concept of scientific publication is to upload his unreviewed documents on to Researchgate. I have written about his citation trawling and false “publication” before in my article  An anti-fluoride trick: Impressing the naive with citations

But, perhaps he is on to something. Irrespective of fluoride (he has a hangup about that element) perhaps lead is somehow implicated in oral health problems. So let’s see what the document actually claims.

It has three aims:.....................................

Nice of Ken to draw our attention to this not that I believe lead is responsible. I spent my early years during the war on the IOW and there were few cars around then but my teeth still decayed. We did have sugar sprinkled on margarine spread on sliced bread. Butter was not available.