The First Fluoride Trial (June 8 - 19, 2020)
The first trial in the TSCA fluoride lawsuit took place in June 2020 over Zoom webinar. The trial lasted two weeks and featured testimony from FAN’s expert witnesses (Drs Hu, Lanphear, Grandjean, and Thiessen) who are subject matter experts on developmental neurotoxicity and risk assessment, pitted against EPA’s witnesses.
Shockingly, EPA did not rely on its own agency experts to defend its position that fluoride is not neurotoxic to humans. Instead it hired an outside consulting company, Exponent, a firm deployed by corporations to deny and downplay the health impacts of chemicals in litigation. Exponent experts attempted to cast doubt on fluoride’s neurotoxic effects even as the EPA’s own scientists, under subpoena by the plaintiffs, said new research does indeed warrant “an update to the fluoride assessment”.
Top EPA Scientist: EPA's Current Fluoride Regulation Is Not Safe
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"I think it's a reason for doing an update to the fluoride assessment" - Dr. Joyce
Donohue, EPA Office of Water, on recent NIH-funded studies showing fluoride
harms the developing brain.
FAN attorney, Michael Connett, gave the opening statement in the trial - a summary of the case that fluoride presents a neurotoxic hazard (a threat to the brain); that this hazard is a risk at doses experienced in fluoridated communities (.7ppm); and that this risk is an “unreasonable risk” as defined by TSCA. The EPA is represented by lawyers from the Department of Justice (DOJ). The DOJ argued in their opening statement that establishing fluoride as a neurotoxic hazard requires a systematic review and without that, FAN’s case falls.
The first fact witness called by the plaintiffs (FAN) was Dr. Joyce Donohue who has worked in the EPA’s Office of Water since the 1996 and has been their spokesperson on fluoride. Her testimony in the trial was based on a video recording of her deposition in 2019. From this deposition our attorney was able to yield two key concessions:
a) The EPA as of 2019 had no studies to provide a pregnant woman to show her fetus was safe from neurotoxicity. In fact the EPA only had studies showing harm to the fetus.
b) Dr. Donohue recommends EPA and other regulatory bodies do risk assessments of fluoride with neurotoxicity as an end point. All EPA risk assessments on fluoride to date have been based on potential damage to teeth and bones.
FAN’s first expert witness called was Dr. Howard Hu, MD, MPH, ScD, the lead author on a series of key NIH-funded research papers on fluoride and developmental neurotoxicity. Hu’s credentials are very impressive. Dr. Hu came across as knowledgeable and credible and was able to summarize the importance of his research, stressing the importance of a loss of 3 or 4 IQ points at the population level while drawing a striking parallel to lead’s neurotoxicity.
Fluoride Lawsuit Witness Spotlight: Dr. Howard Hu
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FAN’s second expert witness, Danish scientist and neurotoxicity expert Philippe Grandjean, MD, DMSc, took the stand on day two. Grandjean is the author of the book Only One Chance, in which he warns of the dangers of exposing children to neurotoxicants during early development, especially during the fetal stage. According to many who watched his testimony, Dr. Grandjean left no doubt that fluoridation poses a threat to the brains of children and easily debunked the EPA’s paid experts’ arguments.
FAN asked Dr. Grandjean to do a review of the literature since his famous 2012 meta-analysis to include the most recent US government-funded studies. Grandjean did this review but he went one step further and quantified the risk of IQ loss from fluoride to children based upon the Bashash 2017 and the Green 2019 (Canadian study) mother-offspring studies. For this analysis Grandjean did what is called a Benchmark Dose study (using methods that he and his colleagues have pioneered, and used by the EPA). He concluded that a safe reference dose (RfD) be no higher than 0.15 mg per day to protect against a loss of one IQ point. This is well below fluoride exposure levels experienced by pregnant women (and passed to the fetus) in the Bashash and Green studies.
Fluoride Lawsuit Witness Spotlight: Dr. Phillipe Grandjean
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FAN’s next expert witness was renowned clinical scientist and professor, Dr. Bruce Lanphear… who’s work on lead….. Dr. Lanphear explained that there was no safe level of fluoride exposure with regard to neurotoxicity, and that the effects seen in recent studies are “equal to what we saw with lead in children.”
Fluoride Lawsuit Witness Spotlight: Dr. Bruce Lanphear
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Next the court watched the deposition video of CDC Oral Health Division Director, Casey Hannan, who confirmed his agency agreed with the National Research Council’s 2006 findings that fluorides “interfere with the function of the brain and body by direct and indirect means,” among many other stunning admissions, yet did nothing to act upon or study these findings.
CDC Agrees With NRC Finding That Fluoride Can Potentially Cause Alzheimer's And Dementia.
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Next up in the trial was fact witness Dr. Kristina Thayer, Director of the US EPA’s Chemical and Pollutant Assessment Division. Dr. Thayer confirmed the vulnerability of the developing brain to environmental toxins as well as fluoride’s known neurotoxicity “at some level.”
The next expert witness was veteran risk assessment scientist Kathleen Thiessen, PhD, who was a member of the 2006 NRC committee that reviewed fluoride, and authored around a third of the report. Dr. Thiessen confirmed that the EPA was ignoring the neurotoxic risk from fluoridation because doing so would require them to effectively ban the practice. She also compared the amount of evidence of neurotoxicity from fluoride to other toxins the EPA currently did regulate as neurotoxic, saying “the amount of evidence for fluoride is considerably larger.”
Fluoride Lawsuit Witness Spotlight: Dr. Kathleen Thiessen
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The EPA then called their first expert witness, Dr. Joyce Tsuji, PhD from corporate consulting firm Exponent. This is the same scientists-for-hire firm the tobacco industry used to deny lung cancer risk. Dr. Tsuji’s answers repeatedly contradicted the testimony from her pre-trial deposition. Eventually FAN attorney Michael Connett was able to get Dr. Tsuji to admit on the stand that “there is enough literature for us to be concerned” about fluoride’s neurotoxicity.
The EPA then called their second expert witness, Dr. Ellen Chang (also from Exponent), to discuss the human fluoride/IQ studies. She spent much of her time attacking the quality of the studies linking fluoride to lowered IQ. FAN attorney Michael Connett was successful in exposing Dr. Chang’s blatant bias and, in a defining moment at trial, was able to get her to admit that the fluoride/IQ studies from Till (2020), Green (2019), and Bashash (2017) were the most rigorous neurotoxicity studies to date.