FAN Newsletter

#GivingTuesday

Our annual fundraiser is off to a great start.  Between yesterday--which was #GivingTuesday--and Monday we raised $2,025 from 24 donors.  This is added to $55,000 that was contributed just prior to the start of our fundraiser by several large donors.  Together, this brings our current totals to $57,025 from 28 donors en route to our ambitious targets of $250,000 from 1,250 donors by midnight Dec 31. 

Thank you to all who have contributed early in our fundraiser, hopefully inspiring others to give as our annual campaign continues over the next five weeks. 

In the new video below, FAN’s Environmental Justice Director, Robin Lewis, discusses why a donation to this often-neglected cause is so important.  If not FAN, who will raise awareness, lobby elected officials, build the grassroots campaigns, educate the media, professionals, and citizens, and maintain the databases necessary to end fluoridation?

How to make a tax-deductible donation to FAN:

• Online at our secure server.
  
• Or by Check, payable to the Fluoride Action Network. Send your check to:
  
  Fluoride Action Network
  c/o Connett
  104 Walnut Street
  Binghamton NY 13905  

*Please note that some corporations match tax deductible donations made by their employees to some non-profits. We qualify for this. This is the information to provide your corporation finance people, the parent body for FAN is the American Environmental Health Studies Project, Inc, registered in Vermont. 

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Millions Freed From Fluoridation

If the dental and chemical lobbies had their way, you would never know about the millions of people who live in communities that have successfully fought to prohibit the addition of fluoridation chemicals to their drinking water.  Fluoridationists would like us all to believe that the practice is continuing to expand, and that the trend is firmly in favor of more towns initiating the practice.  However, this is just more propaganda, as the CDC’s own stats and our records of community victories have affirmed.

Since 2010, at least 245 communities representing approximately 7.2 million people have chosen--either by referendum or by council vote--to prohibit fluoridation (see list of local victories).  More than 500 communities throughout the world have ended existing fluoridation programs or rejected new efforts to fluoridate since 1990, adding millions more freed from fluoridation. Most of these victories were the result of citizens organizing local campaigns and voicing their opposition to public officials, with many working in coordination with FAN or using our materials to educate their neighbors and local decision-makers about the serious health risks associated with the practice.

These numbers don't even reflect the residents who have been spared from countless attempts to pass statewide fluoridation mandates in recent years, which FAN has helped defeat.  In 2018 alone, four seperate mandate bills in Hawaii and New Jersey were met with significant opposition and failed to even pass out of the first committees where they were considered.  If passed, over 5-million people would have had fluoridation chemicals forced upon them, regardless of local opposition and at the expense of taxpayers with no say in the matter.

(Hawaii Representative and Health Committee Chairman John Muzino--far left & I'm on far right--was instrumental in defeating mandate bills in 2018.  He told me, “I will never let a fluoride bill pass.”)

Maybe even more distressing for the dental-lobby, is the fact that the most recent fluoridation statistics from the US Centers for Disease Control show that for the first time in nearly 40 years the percentage of the U.S. population served by community water systems receiving fluoridated water decreased, from 74.6% to 74.4%.  The percentage of the U.S. population receiving so-called “optimally fluoridated” water (natural and artificial) also decreased, from 67.1% to 66.3%, as did the number of water systems adding fluoride chemicals.  

This means that with your help, our movement has stopped the behemoth fluoridation-lobby in their tracks, and have reversed the expansion of fluoridation that has been occurring since the ‘40s.    

Since the CDC’s 2014 stats were collected, the momentum has only continued to trend in our favor.  Our data shows that 79% of community or council votes on fluoridation in the U.S. over the past 5 years were prompted by residents or officials calling for an end to fluoridation, not for implementation of it.  And every attempt to initiate fluoridation has been at the request of dentists and their lobbyists, not independent residents.  

The most recent evidence of this trend was the fluoridation referendum success we had in 2018.  On election day, Springfield, Ohio (pop. served 85,000+) voted 53%-47% to defeat a fluoridation proposal, while residents of Houston, Missouri voted 62%-38% to end their longstanding fluoridation program.  Just two weeks before these two votes, the citizens of Parry Sound, Ontario resoundingly re-affirmed their opposition to the practice.  And in April, a staggering 73% of voters in Edgartown, Massachusetts overwhelming overturned a vote by their health board to initiate fluoridation.  

It’s crucial we maintain this momentum, so we can ensure that fluoridation becomes a thing of the past for you and the world.  FAN is dedicated to creating more resources for campaigners, providing more analysis on key studies, recruiting more professionals to support local campaigners, raising greater awareness in the media and among decisionmakers, and assisting advocates for safe water around the globe with their campaigns.  With your generous financial help, we can make ending water fluoridation the greatest public health achievement of the 21st Century.

 

Stuart Cooper

Campaign Director
Fluoride Action Network