If you're approaching this article on water fluoridation with trepidation, Paul Connett knows how you feel.
"I didn't want this issue," said Connett, the co-author of the recently published book The Case Against Fluoride, in a phone interview last week.
"When my wife dumped a whole bunch of papers on my desk one afternoon in July 1996 and said, 'Dear, would you read these papers?'" he recalled, "I said, 'What is it? What's it about?' She says, 'Fluoridation.' I said, 'Take it away. These people are crazy.'"
Connett already had a full-time job as a professor of chemistry at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. And for a decade he had been a vocal opponent of waste incineration, a cause that sent him around the world presenting lectures.
"I didn't want a third issue," Connett said. "I certainly didn't want this one, which was stigmatized ... as the province of a bunch of Flat Earth Society crazy people. And I'd succumbed to that same notion without doing any research."
That night the Village of Canton was considering whether to continue fluoridation of the city's drinking water. Connett said: "When I started to read the papers that she put there, my intention was as quickly as possible to find out where these crazy anti-fluoridationists had made some fundamental scientific mistakes and [determine] that there was nothing to worry about. ... It didn't take me long to realize that there were some very serious problems with that practice" of fluoridation.
