Page 2709 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 August 1991

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The question is: Were there any groups in Australia who tried to mislead the public by claiming that Burk and Yiamouyiannis had not allowed for differences in age, race and sex? In a media release of 26 June 1979, Dr Michael Henderson, the Deputy Secretary-General of the Australian Medical Association, wrote:

Yiamouyiannis has failed to take proper account of existing differences in age, sex and race ...

In the submission of the Australian Dental Association to the 1980 Victorian inquiry it stated:

The general criticism was that Burk and Yiamouyiannis dealt basically in crude cancer statistics, and did not take into account many factors related to cancer mortality, such as age, sex, race ...

In the submission of the National Health and Medical Research Council to the Victorian inquiry it stated:

By far the most important of the criticisms of Yiamouyiannis and Burk (1977) is of the inadequacies of the procedures ... and [they] did not allow at all for race and sex.

Dr Graeme Dunn, president of the Dental Health Education and Research Foundation, in an official letter of 11 June 1979, said of Dr Burk and Dr Yiamouyiannis:

The true story of these charlatans is beyond belief.

Dr B. Levant, speaking as the chairman of the Australian Dental Association's fluoridation committee, was reported in the Melbourne Age of 29 August 1977 as saying:

Dr Levant said Dr Burk was an eminent biochemist whose "profound qualifications" were not in the cancer field.

Dr Dean Burk, now deceased, was one of the world's leading biochemists, with 50 years' research in cancer. He was co-founder of the United States National Cancer Institute and was with that institute for 35 years. He received a number of major international awards for cancer research. He was a member of some 20 leading scientific organisations, and wrote the texts Cancer, Approaches to Tumor Chemotherapy and Cell Chemistry. Dr Burk published a prodigious 200 scientific, medical papers on cancer alone. He said:


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