BELOW IS AN EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW OF DR. PHYLLIS MULLENIX WHO CLAIMS THAT HER FINDINGS OF THE DAMAGING POTENTIAL OF FLOURIDE EXPOSURE HAVE BEEN SQUELCHED-

Read the complete text of the interview at http://www.fluoridealert.org/mullenix-interview.htm

"The study basically found three things. First of all, that if you put sodium fluoride in the drinking water of young animals, that with time - meaning a period of weeks in a rat's lifetime - they would develop changes in their behavioral patterns. And that pattern change was a hypoactivity pattern. They became slower, 'couch potatoes' if you like. But it was definitely a hypoactivity pattern. And it had a specific pattern to it which was very, very strikingly similar to the pattern that I had seen in substances or drugs that they used to treat acute lymphocytic leukemia in children, which clinically cause IQ deficits. And when I saw that specific pattern... that I was getting when I exposed animals to radiation or chemotherapy and steroids... that was very striking.

I also found that if I started the exposure at a little later age, I would get the same pattern, but I would get it at a blood level of fluoride that was lower, even, than the young animals. So it suggested that, in particular females, that the older animal was more susceptible to this fluoride in the drinking water.

And a part of this whole common theme - what's happening at different ages - we also did a prenatal study. Because I wanted to see if I could do one specific exposure in the prenatal situation giving a subcu[taneous] shot of sodium fluoride at a specific age where a certain part of the brain is developing, if the fetuses of this mother, when they grew up, if they had any type of permanent behavioral damage.

And we gave the subcu[taneous] injections to the mother, we gave no other fluoride exposure, and when those pups were born and when they grew up and we tested them, they had a permanent change. And their pattern was this very distinct changes that are compatible with hyperactivity. Besides the prenatal exposures and the postnatal, the third thing that we wanted to look at was - what were the levels of fluoride in the brain? We had gone back in the literature, and it was said, I think it was Gary Whitford's studies that had said... that fluoride did not get across the blood-brain barrier and get into the brain to any extent. But I had a problem with that study, because what they did was they took fluoride and they gave an IV injection and then 1 hour later they looked at the levels in the brain.

But that's a far different cry from how people really get fluoride, they get it, you know, orally and day-to-day. And so, looking at fluoride levels in brain tissue 1 hour after injecting an IV does not mimic the real world situation at all...

So we went in with our drinking-water exposure, took out the brains - we dissected the brains in these animals into seven different regions - and then analyzed each region for the fluoride content. Now what we found was that, absolutely no question, there was major accumulations of fluoride in all the regions of the brain, and that some areas looked like there were greater accumulations than others, that were sex-determinant. That was a very interesting piece of information.

Just the fact that we could find any level of fluoride at all, when we weren't expecting the brain to accumulate any fluoride, was a very big surprise and very, very disturbing to some people, of all things, that fluoride was accumulating in the brain."

After reviewing the memos, Mullenix declared herself "flabbergasted." She went on, "How could I be told by NIH that fluoride has no central nervous system effects when these documents were sitting there all the time?" She reasons that the Manhattan Project did do fluoride CNS studies --"that kind of warning, that fluoride workers might be a danger to the bomb program by improperly performing their duties--I can't imagine that would be ignored"-- but that the results were buried because they might create a difficult legal and public relations problem for the government.