World Health Organization sees ‘weak evidence’ of human poisoning by endocrine disruptors in chemicals

While admitting humans are experiencing the highest incidence of disease and that thousands of dangerous chemicals are used in products people consume, a World Health Organization report says there is only weak evidence that human health has been adversely affected by the abundance of those chemicals in food and other products.

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | FEBRUARY 25, 2013

There are two facts that are undeniable when it comes to human health. First, despite great advances in science and technology, humans are sicker beings today –both mentally and physically–, when compared to half a century ago, for example. Even worse, the incidence of previously unknown or inexistant diseases has grown exponentially due to ‘inexplicable’ reasons. Second, those who were charged with verifying the safety of the production processes and the goods that are mass-produced for human consumption, failed to point out the dangers, and the side effects of thousands of substances used in the manufacture of industrial products.

The reason for the failure to properly guard human health and the environment from toxic chemicals varies, and it needs to be investigated on a case to case basis, but generally it occurred either due to lack of knowledge or because those watching out for our safety overlooked clear evidence that certain chemicals posed a direct threat to humanity and the environment. Three cases in point: DDT, fluoride in the water, mercury in vaccines, pesticides and herbicides.

In 2013, 41 years after its creation, the World Health Organization finally decided to publish a document where it expresses its concern about the adverse effects that toxic chemicals may have in humans; specifically on the human endocrine system. The document issued by the WHO titled Global Assessment of the State‐of‐the‐Science of Endocrine Disruptors, addresses what millions of people around the world, and thousands of health care practitioners have warned about for many years: chemicals put in the foods we eat, the water we drink and others used in industrial processes harm human health and gravely contaminate the environment.

Unfortunately, the report starts by playing down the role of industrial chemicals in the exponential appearance of disease among humans. The WHO cites as its final conclusion that “although it is clear that certain environmental chemicals can interfere with normal hormonal processes, there is weak evidence that human health has been adversely affected by exposure to endocrine-active chemicals.” As many other unaccountable global organizations, the WHO refused to look at independently gathered evidence that raised concerns about the poisoning of humans and the environment by the industrial process and how chemicals used in the production of food, for example, was the origin of previously unknown diseases.

It took 16 years for the WHO to accept and implement the advice provided by various health groups about the serious problem with the way food is produced as well as the way toxic chemicals are used in the production of the food we ingest. Back in 1997, the Intergovernmental Forum on Chemical Safety and the Environment Leaders of the Eight regarding the issue of EDCs, the International Programme on Chemical Safety (IPCS), a joint programme of WHO, UNEP and the International Labour Organization, began preparing the report issued in 2013.

Along with its general conclusion that its panel of scientists did not find enough evidence –despite all the evidence that exists– that human health is indeed adversely affected by exposure to endocrine disruptors found in toxic chemicals, the WHO report highlights just over a dozen other warning signs that humans, animals and the environment as a whole MAY be experiencing the consequences of systematic poisoning.

After explaining that life on Earth depends on its ability to reproduce and developed normally, the WHO report explains that there is a high incidence and a growing trend of endocrine-related disorders in humans; that there are observations of endocrine-related effects in wildlife populations; and that there is enough evidence that chemicals to which everyone is exposed to have endocrine disrupting properties linked to disease outcomes in laboratory studies. Amazingly, the WHO admits that there is more evidence to suggest that toxic chemicals DO cause endocrine disruptions on animals than on humans.

Endocrine Disruption

Figure 2. Overview of the endocrine system. Obtained from WHO report “State of the Science of Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals”. 2013.

The report found that endocrine-related diseases and disorders are on the rise, especially on young men. It related that in some countries, up to 40% of young men show low semen quality, which translates in their inability to have children. In addition to infertility, the report calls attention to the incidence of genital malformations, adverse pregnancy outcomes, neurobehavioural disorders associated with thyroid disruption, an unexplained rise in endocrine-related cancers that include breast, endometrial, ovarian, prostate, testicular and thyroid, earlier development of the breasts in young girls and the prevalence of obesity and type 2 diabetes, which increased exponentially all over the world for the past 40 years.

The World Health Organization reports that some 800 chemicals are confirmed or suspected to interfere with hormone receptors, hormonal synthesis or conversion and that only a small amount of those chemicals have been properly studied to determine their negative effects on the organisms. That is to say, health watchdogs –both at the national and international levels– traditionally failed to test for the potential or demonstrated threats that toxic chemicals used in the manufacture of food products presented to humans and other forms of life. “The vast majority of chemicals in current commercial use have not been tested at all,” the study admits.

As many independent observations have previously warned, humans and all life on this planet are continuously exposed to Endocrine Disruptive Chemicals (EDC), which traditionally occurs in low but permanent levels. The WHO report confirms this fact by saying that evidence shows that humans and wildlife are exposed to more EDCs than just those found in persistent organic pollutants. The report also confirms that food and drinking water are two major contributors of human and animal poisoning, but that the list of those elements that poison us all is long.

“Children can have higher exposures to chemicals compared with adults—for example, through their hand-to-mouth activity and higher metabolic rate. The speed with which the increases in disease incidence have occurred in recent decades rules out genetic factors as the sole plausible explanation.”

Endocrine Disruption in Babies

Figure 3. Sensitive windows of development. Each tissue has a specific window during development when it is forming. Obtained from WHO report “State of the Science of Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals”. 2013.

The statement above is damning evidence that most, if not all supposedly genetically transmitted diseases, are not really passed on to humans by their progenitors, but by their exposure to chemicals created or used during the production of food and other products. The report goes on detailing that chemicals such as DDT, PCB’s, diethylstilbestrol (DES) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), often used in pesticides and herbicides, or for controlling insect reproduction, are to blame for breast cancer, prostate cancer, non-descended testes.

How can they then say that the evidence is weak when it comes to the relation between toxic chemicals and mass spread disease?

The assessment on endocrine disruptors clarified that much of the damage caused by toxic chemicals happens during pregnancy or early in human life. “Numerous laboratory studies support the idea that chemical exposures contribute to endocrine disorders in humans and wildlife.”

Again, where is the weak link then?

“Developmental exposures can cause changes that, while not evident as birth defects, can induce permanent changes that lead to increased incidence of diseases throughout life.

These insights from endocrine disruptor research in animals have an impact on current practice in toxicological testing and screening. Instead of solely studying effects of exposures in adulthood, the effects of exposures during sensitive windows in fetal development, perinatal life, childhood and puberty require careful scrutiny.”

The WHO report openly admits that organizations that are supposed to be vigilant about the adverse effects of poisons used in the industrial manufacture process have failed time after time to do that very task. “There has been a failure to adequately address the underlying environmental causes of trends in endocrine diseases and disorders.”

Is there room here for liability?

According to the WHO, disease risk induced by endocrine disrupting chemicals may have been significantly underestimated. That is to say, doctors and other health care practitioners who up until today follow the teachings of modern medicine as their base to diagnose disease while ignoring –sometimes purposely– the evidence presented by many studies on the adverse effects of EDC’s, are also to blame for current wave of ‘unknown’ or ‘untreatable disorders.

“We know that humans and wildlife are simultaneously exposed to many EDCs; thus, the measurement of the linkage between exposure to  mixtures of EDCs and disease or dysfunction is more physiologically relevant. In addition, it is likely that exposure to a single EDC may cause disease syndromes or multiple diseases, an area that has not been adequately studied.” Why not? Certainly nor because of lack of funding. Perhaps disinterest from the part of large pharmaceutical conglomerates who conduct their own studies with the ONLY intention to show whether a product is effective, but not to determine its safety or the long-term adverse effects on humans. The same is true for companies like Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta and others which brag about their technological discoveries even though many independent tests prove, beyond reasonable doubt that their GMO’s, herbicides and pesticides are killing people all over the world.

Despite the mounting evidence presented in its own study, the skyrocketing incidence of disease in the last 50 years and the growing trends that show how EDC’s are more and more involved in causing adverse effects on human populations, the WHO again limits the relation between EDC’s and disease as a matter of association, instead of going beyond and calling it a matter of cause and effect. The report says that human studies can show associations only. But what happens when those associations continue to appear, study after study? Doesn’t that build a clear relationship of cause and effect?

Since most main stream corporate or government financed studies do not properly test for the effects of EDC’s on humans, because they are conducted with a very low number of subjects and for a very short time, the WHO has determined that this ‘association’ does not go beyond casual results that do not offer enough evidence to pose a cause and effect relationship. This is so, because although the mounting evidence, most tests are not designed to show that cause-effect relationship, which immediately invalidates them as reliable proof or evidence that toxic chemicals have –for a long time– caused disease in people and polluted the environment.

The report correctly points out that the shift already taking place from determining associations to testing for links –cause and effect– is the way to go to show what it deems as solid evidence that toxic chemicals indeed cause disease. But the WHO still fails to recognize what many studies have determined: that the adverse effects of early and continuous exposure to toxic chemicals are only detected late in life. Those effects, as explained before, are usually misdiagnosed by most doctors, who usually tell their patients that the origin of their illness is still unknown and that there is no way to treat the causes; only the symptoms. At this point, patients are condemned to taking pharmaceutical drugs for the rest of their lives, which eventually end up killing them due to their own adverse effects.

So, the state of human health today is equally bad from two different fronts. People are either killed by long-term exposure to toxic chemicals used in the production process of food or in the food itself, or they die while trying to ‘cure’ their diseases with industrialized pharmaceuticals whose own side effects are as deadly as those from the chemicals people are trying to get rid of. Either way, people die long, painful deaths.

So what is next? What needs to be done to end this vicious circle of disease? Can long-term studies be the solution? I think it is too little too late for that. Waiting another 10 or 20 years to see the result of long-term tests is not something a lot of people can afford now. That does not mean that those studies should not be done. It means that people need to find solutions by themselves. Now that the World Health Organization has finally confessed they have not done their job to protect people from dangerous substances –quite the opposite is true–  people need to understand that their nutrition is their responsibility. It always has been so. From the part of the organizations that are supposed to keep us safe from the dangers of toxic chemicals, it is time to stop talking and start walking.

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The Bizarre History of Fluoride in the Water

THE REAL AGENDA | FEBRUARY 1, 2013

Does Artificial Water Fluoridation Mean No Golden Years For The Elderly? (1)

Research reveals a startling new finding: fluoride likely contributes to the epidemic of cardiovascular disease by stimulating calcification of the vascular system, including the coronary arteries. (2)

Fluoride does not reduce cavities and does causes brittle bones and a soft brain. (3)

Is Fluoride and Fluoridation Causing/Contributing To Cancer & Other Diseases? (4)

US Water to be Poisoned with Fluoride Despite Public Rejection

by Ethan Huff
NaturalNews.com
December 27, 2011

Back in October, the Pinellas County, Fla., Commission voted 4 – 3 to stop adding artificial fluoride chemicals to the county’s municipal water supply, which serves roughly 700,000 residents (http://www.naturalnews.com/033801_f…). But now local health officials are suggesting that the county purchase a mobile fluoride van as an alternative, which would drive around town and administer fluoride and other conventional dental services directly to children.

Believe it or not, the St. Petersburg Times reports that the Pinellas County Commission will soon vote on whether or not to purchase this mobile fluoride van for $532,339 in taxpayer funds, which is more than twice the $205,000 a year the county has been spending to purchase fluoride chemicals for the water supply. The Commission had asked the county’s Health and Human Services department to come up with a new way to use the $205,000 for other dental purposes, and the mobile fluoride van was their proposal.

“There’s no way I’m going to support a $532,000 item,” said Commissioner John Morroni, who was one of the members who voted in favor of ending water fluoridation. “You can buy a lot of toothpaste and help the dentists disburse it.”

Morroni is right, of course — if the county is persistent in making sure as many children as possible are fluoridated, there are much less expensive ways to distribute it than to purchase a half-million-dollar van. But the van’s proponents say it is the “most efficient option” for making sure children do not escape getting their fluoride.

Never has it been proven that consuming fluoride in any way helps improve teeth, though, despite what health officials claim. And adding fluoride chemicals to water, which is their preferred method, is a very poor method of delivery even if the chemical did help teeth. This is because 99 percent or more of flouride ends up on lawns or flowing down the drain, rather than actually being ingested.

There is also no way to regulate the ingestion of the so-called “optimum” level of fluoride because individuals drink varying amounts of fluoridated water, and are also exposed to it in unknown amounts through their skin whenever they wash their hands or take a shower. In other words, water fluoridation is one of the most unscientific, unsubstantiated, and ridiculous “public health” schemes to ever be devised, and it is nothing more than forced medication of the masses.

Be sure to check out the laundry list of diseases and health conditions that can develop as a result of fluoride exposure:
http://www.fluoridealert.org/health/

Fluoride depletes iodine in the body

Iodine depletion causes hypothyroidism and immune deficiency

NaturalNews.com
February 14,2011

Fluoride is getting a lot of bad press these days, and for good reason: it is a toxic molecule that wreaks extensive, often irreversible, havoc on the body. The thyroid is particularly affected by fluoride exposure because its store of iodine is depleted. Iodine deficiency depresses the thyroid’s metabolic and immune functions, resulting in hypothyroidism and lowered immunity.

Fluoride and iodine are both halogens. Fluoride, the negative ion of the element fluorine, easily displaces iodine in the body because it is much lighter and therefore more reactive. In fact, the activity of any one of the halogens (Iodine 126.70, Bromine 79.90, Chlorine 35.45, Fluorine 18.99 are the most common) is inversely proportional to its atomic weight. In other words, one halogen can displace another one of a higher atomic weight but cannot displace one of lower weight.

Lack of iodine shuts down production of thyroxine, the thyroid prohormone that controls metabolism, and, in one way or another, impacts every aspect of health. The resulting hypothyroidism causes weight gain, cold intolerance, dry and prematurely aged skin, depression, constipation, hair loss, memory loss, irritability, increased cholesterol levels, heart disease and loss of libido.

But the action of iodine in the thyroid is not limited to metabolism; it also has an important immune function. Blood circulates through the thyroid once every 17 minutes in what has been called the ’17 minute passage’. Secretion of iodine, a potent germ killer, into the blood stream as it is passing through the thyroid weakens invading organisms, allowing them to be more easily eradicated. If the thyroid is deficient in iodine, this critical step in immunity will be reduced or eliminated.

Unlike iodine, which the body cannot store long-term, fluoride is a problematic and persistent toxin. Its effects are systemic and only about half of what is ingested can be excreted; the rest is stored in bones and tissues, blocking access to other elements, like iodine.

Fluoride exposure can come from multiple obvious and not-so-obvious sources. In addition to dental hygiene products and drinking water, many breakfast cereals, juices from concentrate, soda and other processed foods contain alarming levels. Fluoride-containing pesticide use means that the environment is being flooded with fluoride by conventional agriculture (http://www.fluoridealert.org/f-pest…). Also, many antidepressants contain large amounts of fluoride and are widely prescribed, often for a lifetime of use.

Conventional medicine’s response to hypothyroidism typically ignores causes and prescribes synthetic thyroxine hormone in an attempt to balance out the health equation with another unnatural substance; this is nothing new. But hypothyroidism is a national epidemic, affecting roughly 10% of the female population in the US and in no way sparing men. It has created a stable, ever-expanding market for these cash cow thyroid drugs (the leading thyroid drug was number 7 on JAMA’s list of ‘most commonly prescribed’ in 2006; one year later it was number 4).

One might assume then that fluoride’s role in depressing thyroid function is a new discovery, that government fluoride programs simply lack this vital information. Yet research has been taking place since the 1930s, when fluoride was used to treat individuals with overactive thyroid. The relationship is well established, and old.

Which leads inevitably to a difficult question: How could government allow fluoride addition to drinking water, approve fluoride-containing drugs and pesticides, and fail to test for fluoride content in food when there is a known connection with serious thyroid complications?

Perhaps the cash value of the fact that millions of Americans take thyroid drugs, and most likely will take them the rest of their lives, can suggest an unbiased, honest answer.

Oxford Professor: Poison water to medicate population

Oxford professor Julian Savulescu says fluoridation demonstrates how populations of the future could be mass-medicated through pharmacological ‘cognitive enhancements’ added to the water supply.

Aaron Dykes

In a 2008 paper titled, “Fluoride and the Future: Population Level Cognitive Enhancement,” Oxford bioethics professor Julian Savulescu claims that water fluoridation may be key to the “future of humanity.” He argues that “fluoridation may not merely be about tooth decay… [but] the drive to be better.”

Drugging the population’s water supply, Savulescu claims, is a form of “enhancement” that can pave the way to a future where mental abilities and other functions could be improved with drugs. Savulescu writes:

“Fluoridation is the tip of the enhancement iceberg. Science is progressing fast to develop safe and effective cognitive enhancers, drugs which will improve our mental abilities. For years, people have used crude enhancers, usually to promote wakefulness, like nicotine, caffeine and amphetamines. A new generation of more effective enhancers is emerging modafenil, ritalin, Adderral and ampakines and the piracetam family of memory improvers.”

But once highly safe and effective cognitive enhancers are developed – as they almost surely will be – the question will arise whether they should be added to the water, like fluoride, or our cereals, like folate. It seems likely that widespread population level cognitive enhancement will be irresistible.

The dream Savulescu argues for is based upon the lie that fluoridation of the public water supply has been a tremendous human advancement. Supporting that lie is the boasted claim by the Center for Disease Control that water fluoridation ranks among the top 10 public health achievements of the 20th Century. Instead, fluoride has been linked with neurological effects, thyroid problems, bone cancer and even crippling-blindness. What’s more, much of it is not even the common-but-toxic sodium fluoride, but an industrial waste derivative known as hydrofluosilicic acid– in an estimated 2/3 of the fluoridated public water in the U.S. and known to be very deadly.

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Savulescu is flawed to hope fluoride can pave the way to an alchemically-”improved” society, especially where forced-medication is involved. The vision is distinctly like that of Brave New World, wherein author Aldous Huxley predicts a future dictatorship where people “learn to love their servitude.” What Huxley terms in the novel “Soma” would most likely come in reality in the form of numerous drugs that would tackle individual happiness, and the larger complacency of the masses at large. Solidified by a Scientific Dictatorship, a pharmacologically-treated population would be rendered very unlikely to ever revolt against the regime in power.

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”

A ‘scientific’ form of control doesn’t necessarily imply the rise of enlightenment or technological innovation, but rather the guaranteed control of its population through a tested understanding of human behavior– including breaking point, resistance, anger– and the the ability to systematically stay one-step or many more ahead of what anyone might do.

DRUGS AND CHEMICALS ALREADY IN OUR FOOD & WATER

So could “cognitive enhancers” like Ritalin, Prozac and other chemically-engineered drugs be added to the water supply in the future to make humans better, smarter or faster? Or could they make humans docile, complacent and dangerously subservient?

Such proposals are already underway, and what’s more, whether intentional or not, spiked water supplies are already affecting populations in the U.S. and across the globe.

Huxley stated:

Kurt Nimmo reported in December 2009 on a newspiece advocating adding lithium to the water supply as a mood stabilizer:

Japanese researchers, according to Georgiou, are “investigating whether trace amounts of lithium can just change the mood in a community enough — in a really positive way without having the bad effects of lithium — to really affect the mood and decrease the suicide rate.”

Moreover, the AP exposed in 2008 that pharmaceutical drugs were found in the majority of the United States’ water supply. According to the AP, at least 46 million people are affected by the issue.

The New York Times sums in ‘There are drugs in the drinking water. Now what?‘ that: “There are traces of sedatives in New York City’s water. Ibuprofen and naproxen in Washington, D.C. Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety drugs in southern California… But how bad is it, exactly?”

The U.S. Geological Survey lists the “emerging contaminants in the environment” and specifically notes what is affecting the water supply. Contaminating compounds range from herbicides to pharmaceuticals, endocrine disruptors and household chemicals.

New research has also uncovered the presence of chemicals known as Antiandrogens that are finding their way into the water supply. Paul Joseph Watson writes:

Antiandrogens used in pesticides sprayed on our food have also been identified as “endocrine disruptors” that have been “demonstrated to induce demasculinization in rats.”

More shockingly, population control advocates like White House Science Advisor John P. Holdren have advocated adding sterilants to the water supply. He wrote about it alongside Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich in their 1977 book Ecoscience.

“Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control.”

“It must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.”

Spreading disease, like “enhancements” or sterilization, could be the intention of food or water additives. In 2002, The Melbourne Age reported on Nobel Peace Prize winning microbiologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet’s plan to help the Australian government develop biological weapons for use against Indonesia and other “overpopulated” countries of South-East Asia. From the article:

Sir Macfarlane recommended in a secret report in 1947 that biological and chemical weapons should be developed to target food crops and spread infectious diseases. His key advisory role on biological warfare was uncovered by Canberra historian Philip Dorling in the National Archives in 1998.

“Specifically to the Australian situation, the most effective counter-offensive to threatened invasion by overpopulated Asiatic countries would be directed towards the destruction by biological or chemical means of tropical food crops and the dissemination of infectious disease capable of spreading in tropical but not under Australian conditions,” Sir Macfarlane said.

Alex Jones recently exposed the fact that all the adulterated and dangerous chemical additives in our food and water are put there intentionally as put of a larger eugenics program.

The potential to use food and water as a weapon of mass-medication has long been used in times of war, under the principle of attrition and destabilization. Lord Bertrand Russell has underscored this concept rather bluntly in how it applies to societies living under the scientific age:

“Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. . . It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.” – The Impact of Science on Society, 1953

“Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play. – Education in a Scientific Society p.251

CHEMICAL LOBOTOMY: ENLIGHTENMENT IN A BRAVE NEW WORLD

It’s a brave new world indeed where Oxford professor Julian Savulescu argues for the “Ethics of Enhancement.” In his 2002 paper, “Genetic interventions and the ethics of enhancement of human beings,” Savulesco argues for using gene therapy and drug therapy to make “happier, healthier people.” It could mean adding both mental-boosting and mood-enhancing chemicals to the things everyone eats or drinks.

It is interesting that Savulescu mentions fluoride alongside “cognitive enhancements,” as many critics have pointed towards the use of fluoride in Nazi concentration camps to keep the inmates passive, and questioned whether a docile population is a hidden purpose of the water fluoridation campaigns in the United States and post-war Western world. Further, fluoride is a basic ingredient in both Prozac, which is the leading brand-name for Fluoxetine (FLUoxetene Hydrochloride) as well as Sarin nerve gas (Isopropyl-Methyl-Phosphoryl FLUoride), which are fundamentally mind-altering substances.

Fluoride isn’t the only controversial substance Savulescu terms as an advance in human civilization. He touts the widespread use of Prozac and points to the use of Modafenil, an amphetamine, to keep Air Force pilots alert during missions in Iraq. Savulescu is also a proponent of most types of genetic-enhancement that have been proposed. He sees experiments like the genetically-engineered “supermouse” as a model for the potential supermen of the future.

However, all of these “enhancements” come with risks. Genetically-engineered foods have proved deadly and dangerous; gene-splicing has proved to have unforeseeable consequences; fluorides and pharmaceutical chemicals pose dangers of addiction, brain damage, cancer or other problems.

Savulescu poses the potential to “enhance” a.k.a. “control” behavior: “If the results of recent animal studies into hard work and monogamy apply to humans, it may be possible in the future to genetically change how we are predisposed to behave. This raises a new question: should we try to engineer better, happier people?” p. 7-8

NOT UTILIZING ENHANCEMENTS COULD BE ‘WRONG’

He goes on to argue that while many have raised questions about the moral and ethical dilemmas of biological enhancement, NOT enhancing could be most wrong. In this scenario, not feeding offspring “enhanced” food additives could be considered as an offense:

First Argument for Enhancement: Choosing Not to Enhance Is Wrong – Consider the case of the Neglectful Parents. The Neglectful parents give birth to a child with a special condition. The child has a stunning intellect but requires a simple, readily available, cheap dietary supplement to sustain his intellect. But they neglect the diet of this child and this results in a child with a stunning intellect becoming normal. This is clearly wrong.”

“But now consider the case of the Lazy Parents. They have a child who has a normal intellect but if they introduced the same dietary supplement, the child’s intellect would rise to the same level as the child of the Neglectful Parent. They can’t be bothered with improving the child’s diet so the child remains with a normal intellect. Failure to institute dietary supplementation means a normal child fails to achieve a stunning intellect. The inaction of the Lazy Parents is as wrong as the inaction of the Neglectful parents. It has exactly the same consequence: a child exists who could have had a stunning intellect but is instead normal. Some argue that it is not wrong to fail to bring about” p. 10

Savulescu’s vision is distinctly “transhumanist” a branch of the eugenics movement which seeks to improve the human species to the point that highly-gifted individuals would transcend into a new & improved proto-human species– becoming godlike creatures with unique creative potential and abilities. Transhumanism was first termed by UNESCO founder Julian Huxley in 1952, the grandson of Charles Darwin’s partner at the Royal Society of Science, T.H. Huxley.

“I believe in transhumanism”: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Pekin man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.
-Julian Huxley, 1957

LIBERAL EUGENICS: “VOLUNTARY” ENHANCEMENTS THROUGH MASS-MEDICATED WATER

That philosophy of Transhumanism, moreover, is necessarily rooted in the Eugenics movement of the early 20th Century that was led by the scientific elite of the Royal Society, which included Charles Darwin, his cousin Francis Galton and Thomas H. Huxley. This circle and their allies floated Utopian visions for a scientifically- and eugenically- engineered society that would be progressive and even transformative, theoretically producing a ‘better’, albeit tightly-authoritarian society (science demands control, in that sense).

Savulescu identifies with much of this “liberal Eugenics,” defensibly separate from Nazi eugenics because there is ‘no belief in only one gene-type’ and because its measures remain “voluntary.”

“What was objectionable about the eugenics movement, besides its shoddy scientific basis, was that it involved the imposition of a State vision for a healthy population and aimed to achieve this through coercion.” p. 21

However, proposals to add medication to the population’s water supply are involuntary, and would violate individual rights. It would be mass-medication, and avoiding the substances treated with it would be costly, burdensome and difficult to do with any finality. Savulescu apparently views compulsory water treatment in the same vein as compulsory vaccinations, and anything else that can be justified on a public health care basis, even when such treatments prove not to be healthy at all.

“Some interventions, however, may still be clearly enhancements for our children and so just like vaccinations or other preventative health care.” p. 27

Additionally, while the figures of “liberal eugenics” which Savulescu looked up to often espoused semi-tolerant “voluntary” proposals, it was always clear that the long-term vision encompassed measures of control ‘for the betterment of all’ that could not function under voluntary or ‘democratic’ conditions. What’s more, eugenical laws passed in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States and Britain– some of which weren’t repealed until the late 1970s– gave the State authority over forcible sterilization and beyond. Thus, these “voluntary” enhancement-visionaries have already crossed the line of trust and betrayed the fact that they mean to control with force.

Advancements and innovations in science, technology and health have obvious potential benefits, but with kind of dangerous ideology driving the science policy, public health is at a serious risk. Worse still, driving the population into that system has been an intentional scheme by certain ideologues. We cannot flirt with ushering a Brave New World knowing its sweet poison is certain despotism.