Fluoride Journal

Letter to the editor
Fluoride 40(1)75–76
January-March 2007
“Tardive photopsia’ and the Tiel-Culemborg study
Moolenburgh
75 75
“TARDIVE PHOTOPSIA” AND THE TIEL-CULEMBORG STUDY
In his wide-ranging editorial on “tardive photopsia” in the July-September 2006 issue of Fluoride,1 managing editor Bruce Spittle served up an intellectual feast of scientific discoveries that ultimately overturned many widely held but mistaken notions and beliefs. He presented a cogent analysis of what is now known versus past misconceptions about water fluoridation and tooth decay with telling examples from recent official studies in New Zealand. Its promoters, by selectively citing data, try to make fluoridation look effective in preventing tooth decay. However, when findings from large-scale surveys are compared, the supposed caries reductions are often not very evident, or they disappear. In Holland, the Tiel-Culemborg fluoridation study was promoted and is still cited in the dental literature as an example of the effectiveness of water fluoridation to reduce tooth decay. But after fluoridation was discontinued in 1974, dental caries continued to decline throughout Holland. However, as I have
noted previously, there is more to the story. At the time fluoridation of Tiel began in 1952, there were significant dietary differences between Tiel and the nonfluoridated control city of Culemborg. Children in Culemborg ate twice as much yogurt as children did in Tiel, and, like most Dutch children, they usually sweetened their yogurt heavily with sugar.2 Not only that, the planners of the study, Professors O Backer Dirks, KG Konig, and B Houwink, arranged for the infant center in Tiel—but not in Culemborg—to make available to mothers a less cariogenic, sugar-free form of Liga cake, the first solid food commonly given to infants and toddlers.2 Only after fluoridation in Tiel had ended in late 1973 were physicians throughout Holland informed by the manufacturers that the sugar-free form of Liga cake would be made available outside of Tiel. Thus when fluoridation started, children in Tiel were quietly given an advantage with less sugar in their diet. We were also told that fluoridation had been proved to be absolutely safe, but after Dr Meta Asselbergs found a preponderance of mold infections compared to bacterial infections in the sputum of bronchitis patients in Tiel and refused to stop this research, she was fired. Only later did she discover that Tiel was fluoridated.
My biologist colleague in Haarlem, Dr GW Grimbergen,3 similarly found that mold overcame bacterial growth in fluoridated water, whereas bacterial growth dominated in nonfluoridated water.
At a meeting of health officials after fluoridation had ended, the question was asked: Was there was any evidence of changes in the bodies of the people in Tiel compared to those in Culemborg? An official responded: “Well, you know, the average weight of people in fluoridated Tiel was one kilogram more than in nonfluoridated Culemborg.” He was hastily hushed up, but the word was out that there was a measurable difference between the two cities, whatever the exact reason might have been. Another report, which I have also noted,4 revealed that certain neurological disorders and cancer among women had become more prevalent in Tiel than in Culemborg..................................