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EWG Project

Harvard Fluoride Findings Misrepresented?

June 2005

Environmental Working Group (EWG) has obtained documents suggesting that the Chairman of the Department of Oral Health Policy and Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine falsified reporting to the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Chester Douglass has received several years of large federal grants to study the possible relationship between bone cancer in boys and drinking fluoridated water. Reporting on the findings of this funding, he told federal officials unequivocally that there was no relationship, but the grant-funded publication he cited found exactly the opposite. In fact, the research was done by a former doctoral student of Douglass's and was the most rigorous study of its kind to date.

Douglass has made the same assertion to the National Academy of Sciences panel now reviewing the safety of fluoridated drinking water. He is the publisher of a Colgate-funded fluoride journal.

EWG has filed an ethics complaint against Douglass with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).

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