Fluoride Study Rife With Conflicts Of Interest

To the editors:



Many thanks to The Crimson for its fine coverage of the shameful Chester Douglass scandal (“At the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, One Professor’s Fluoride Scandal Stinks,” magazine, Sept. 27). Harvard continues to stonewall and hope that the whole sorry mess will just go away. Clearly, the millions of dollars of National Institutes of Health money that Douglass has brought into Harvard’s coffers supersede the significance of a few hundred victims of bone cancer each year. Douglass, a known proponent of water fluoridation and editor of a Colgate-Palmolive newsletter, should never have been put in charge of research on the potential link between fluoridation and bone cancer. And the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences shouldn’t have turned the ethics investigation of a major grant recipient and million dollar donor over to Harvard. All involved are clearly unable to cogently explain how Douglass did not suppress and misrepresent the Bassin data showing a “robust” link between exposure to fluoridated water and increased bone cancer rates in young boys. So much for veritas.



NAOMI H. FLACK

Palm Beach Gardens, FL

September 27, 2006



The writer graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1964.