FLUORIDATION-LINKED HUMAN CANCERBASED ON TIME-TREND MORTALITY DATA, By Dean Burk, Ph.D., U.S. National Cancer Institute, Retired, and Dean Burk Foundation, Inc., and John Yiamouyiannis, Ph.D., National Health Federation.
(Abstract of paper presented at the Seventh Annual Conference of the International Society for Fluoride Research held at Zandervoort, Holland, February 8-10, 1976.)
Mortality time-trend data linking increased (“excess”) human cancer deaths with artificial fluoridation of public drinking waters have been reported in 1975 (1) by us in the Congressional record, December 16, pp. H 12732-4, with respect to American central cities, on a year-by-year basis, for age-unadjusted death rates for all races and both sexes; and (2) to some extent by the U.S. National Cancer Institute in a 36-page typewritten report issued November 14 by Hoover, McKay, and Fraumeni, with respect to American counties, on o five-year (pentad) basis, for age-adjusted cancer deaths in white males and females.
(1) Our report involved a study of 11,500,000 persons in the 10 largest American central cities artificially fluoridated “100%” for an average of 15 years that showed by 1969 an approximately 18% excess cancer death rate (ca. 3600 excess cancer deaths per 10,000,000 persons per year) as compared to the rate found for 7,000,000 persons in the 10 largest American central cities not artificially fluoridated (“0%”) and whose cancer death rate and rate of increase with time were virtually identical (numerically matched) with those of the fluoridated group during its pre-fluoridation period, 1940-1950. When the latter group was then fluoridated during the years 1952-56 and thereafter, its average mortality rate immediately and steadily increased above that of the average mortality rate of the non-fluoridated group, with a significant difference evident by no more than two years, and very marked by five years. The 3600 excess cancer deaths per year per 10,000,000 persons would, by simple extrapolation as a first approximation, amount to some 29,000 excess cancer deaths/ year/80,000,000 persons subjected to artificial fluoridation in the United States in 1969, and 33,000 excess cancer deaths/year/93,000,000 persons currently subjected to artificial fluoridation in 1975. Such mortality values are of the order of magnitude as those for the two leading cancer death sites in the United States, namely, breast and lung. We have made many other year-by-year time-trend comparisons with other groupings of fluoridated and non-fluoridated cities, and also on single cities before and after artificial fluoridation, with similar observations of prompt and increasing linkage of fluoridation with excess cancer deaths as a function of time.
(2) The November NCI (National Cancer Institute) Report, in its Table 4, appears to show, after an average of 15 years of artificial fluoridation initiated during the 1950-1954 pentad for white males and females, for the “fluoridated 67% or more/control” counties in “Other and Unspecified sites,” an average of 17% excess cancer death rate ratio, involving some 1,000 excess cancer deaths per year in this one county grouping alone. Other pentad county groupings'(1955-59, 1960-64) show similar but smaller values on the average, and the same is true with respect to cervix uteri and corpus uteri sites. Data on many other sites, as reported in Tables 2 and 3, in terms SMR’s, cannot be similarly and properly evaluated by an independent observer because of missing basis data: rounding off to one decimal point instead of two as in Table 4; often too small numbers of deaths; population sizes not specified explicitly; insufficiently defined extents of county fluoridation and non-fluoridation; relative rather than absolute cancer mortality rates reported; and, in general, pentad trends that are considerably less satisfactory than year-by-year trends. The NCI Report techniques of analysis are nearly all intended to avoid or minimize positive indications of fluoridation-linked human cancer, but, in any event, the minimum positive effects reported in its data are of a magnitude sufficient, as our data (1) does overwhelmingly, to call for evocation in the United States of the Delaney Amendment (1958) to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that states that no food additive “shall be deemed safe if it is found to induce cancer when ingested by man or animal,” i.e., it cannot be added to the food or drink of humans in the United States.
