Fluoride Information

Fluoride is a poison. Fluoride was poison yesterday. Fluoride is poison today. Fluoride will be poison tomorrow. When in doubt, get it out.


An American Affidavit

Saturday, October 31, 2015

The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson Forward and Introduction from archive.org

The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson Forward and Introduction from archive.org

Christopher Bryson 

with a lo/ewofd by Dr. Theo Colborn 



"Christopher Bryson is an excellent narrator, and he reports on recent 
research previously not known to me. Especially I am intrigued by the story 
about Phyllis Mullenix and her animal research on the influence of fluoride 

on behavior and brain development It is my sincere hope that his book 

will receive the attention it deserves and that its implications will be seri- 
ously considered." 

Dr. Arvid Carlsson. 2000 Nobel Prize Laureate for Medicine 

"In much the same way biologist Rachel Carson warned us over forty 
years ago in Silent Spring about the havoc and harm being caused by the 
misuse of persistent pesticides, journalist Christopher Bryson here lays 
bare the secret story and hidden dangers of the introduction of fluoride 
chemicals from the cold war era into our drinking water. The irrefutable evi- 
dence of duplicity and cover-up presented in this book is hair-raising. The 
Fluoride Deception presents a scorching indictment of how researchers 
and health care officials working closely with government agencies, big 
industry, and their attorneys have allowed themselves to surrender their 
responsibility for the medical well-being of their fellow citizens." 

Dr. Albert W. Burgstahler. former president of the 
International Society for Fluoride Research and 
Emeritus Professor of Organic Chemistry, University of Kansas 

"Bryson is nght on in his emphasis on the ineffectiveness of fluoridation of 
water with industrial wastes, and its nsks of nerve and brain damage, and 
cancer, coupled with the long-standing industrial conspiracy to suppress 
this information." 

Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition 
and Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine, 
University of Illinois School of Public Health 

"The Fluoride Deception compellingly and inescapably exposes the mur- 
derous fraud that heads of state and industry have for decades perpe- 
trated on an innocent public. Extremely well written and tightly researched, 
The Fluoride Deception is sure to become the 'must read' book in this 
important and burgeoning field." 

Derrick Jensen, author of The Culture of Make Believe 
and A Language Older Than Words 



Toute entreprise humaine, fut-elle industrielle, est susceptible de 
perfectionnement ! 

Inscription on memorial to the sixty dead of the 1930 Meuse 
Valley disaster 



It is not just a mistake for public health agencies to cooperate and 
collaborate with industries investigating and deciding whether public 
health is endangered — it is a direct abrogation of the duties and 
responsibilities of those public health organizations. 
Scientist Clair Patterson to the U.S. Senate, 



If you aint thinking about Man, God and Law, you aint thinking 
about nothin . 



Joe Strummer (1952-2002) 



Contents 



Foreword by Theo Colborn vii 
Note on Terminology x 
Acknowledgments xii 
Introduction xiv 

Major Figures in the Fluoride Story xxii 

1 Through the Looking Glass 1 

2 Fireworks at Forsyth 1 1 

3 Opposite Sides of the Atlantic 30 

4 General Groves s Problem 45 

5 General Groves s Solution: Dr. Harold Hodge and 

the University of Rochester 65 

6 How the Manhattan Project Sold Us Fluoride: 

Newburgh, Harshaw, and Jim Conants Ruse 78 

7 A Subterranean Channel of Secret-Keeping 91 

8 Robert Kehoe and The Kettering Laboratory 101 

9 Donora: A Rich Mans Hocus Pocus 1 14 

10 The Public Health Service Investigation 133 

1 1 As Vital to Our National Life As a Spark Plug to a Motor Car 148 

12 Engineering Consent 158 

13 Showdown in the West: Martin vs. Reynolds Metals 168 

14 Fluorine Lawyers and Government Dentists: A Very 
Worthwhile Contribution 176 

15 Buried Science, Buried Workers 184 



16 Hurricane Creek: The People Rule 202 

17 The Damage Is Done 217 Epilogue: Blind to the 
Truth? 230 

Postscript: Dr. Arvid Carlsson, 2000 Nobel Laureate 240 Note on 
Sources 242 Notes 247 



Index 359 



Foreword 



THEO COLBORN 

THE QUESTION OF whether fluoride is or is not an essential element is 
debatable. In other words, is the element, fluorine, required for normal 
growth and reproduction? On one hand there appears to be a narrow range 
of topical exposure in which it might prevent cavities. But if exposure is 
too high, it causes serious health problems. And could an individual who is 
totally deprived of fluoride from conception through adulthood survive? 
Definitive research to resolve these questions has never appeared in the 
public record or in peer-reviewed journals. It is important to keep this fact 
in mind as you read this book. 

Chris Bryson informs us that fluorine is, indeed, an essential element in 
the production of the atom bomb, and there is good reason to believe that 
fluoridated drinking water and toothpaste — and the development of the 
atom bomb — are closely related. This claim sounded pretty far-fetched to 
me, and consequently I was extremely skeptical about the connection when 
I started reading the book. Bryson writes with the skill of a top-selling 
novelist, but it was not his convincing storytelling that made me finish the 
book. It was the haunting message that possibly here again was another 
therapeutic agent, fluoride, that had not been thoroughly studied before it 
was foisted on the public as a panacea to protect or improve health. Bryson 
reveals that the safety of fluoride became a firmly established paradigm 
based on incomplete knowledge. The correct questions were never asked 
(or never answered when they were asked), thus giving birth to false or 
bottomless assumptions that fluoride was therapeutic and safe. Certainly, 
the evidence Bryson unearthed in this book begs for immediate attention by 
those responsible for public health. 

As the story unfolds, Bryson weaves pieces of what at first appears to be 
totally unrelated evidence into a tapestry of intrigue, greed, 



FOREWORD 



collusion, personal aggrandizement, corporate and government cover-up, 
and U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) mistakes. While reading the book, 
I kept thinking back to 1950, three years after I got my BS degree in 
Pharmacy and the year I gave birth to my first child. Fluoride came on the 
market packaged in pediatric vitamin drops for infants. Mothers left the 
hospital with their new babies in their arms and prescriptions in their hands 
from their dismissing physicians for these fluoride-laced drops. About that 
time communities around the country began to add fluoride to their 
drinking water. The promised benefits of fluoride were so positive that my 
dentist friends began to wish that they had chosen dermatology instead of 
dentistry. At that same time pregnant women were being given a 
pharmaceutical, diethylstilbestrol (DES), to prevent miscarriages, as 
well as DES-laced prescription vitamins especially designed for pregnant 
women to produce big, fat, healthy babies. I felt good when I dispensed the 
fluoride and DES prescriptions — they were products designed to prevent 
health problems rather than treat them. Now I can only wonder how many 
children were harmed because I and others like me took the word of the 
National Institutes of Health (NIH), the USPHS, and the major 
pharmaceutical companies producing these products. We were caught up in 
the spin. We were blind to the corporate hubris and were swept along with 
the blissful enthusiasm that accompanies every new advance in modern 
technology and medicine. 

The hazards posed by prenatal exposure to DES surfaced a lot sooner 
than those posed by fluoride. And although by 1958 it was discovered that 
DES caused a rare vaginal cancer that until that time had been found only 
in postmenopausal women, its use during pregnancy was not banned until 
1971 — thirteen years later. Even this year, 2003, new discoveries are being 
reported about the impact on health in the sons and daughters of the DES 
mothers, and now in their grandchildren. It is estimated that in the United 
States alone there are ten million daughters and sons. In comparison to 
DES, where exposure could be traced through prescription records, the 
extent of exposure to fluorides through drinking water, dental products, 
vitamins, and as Bryson points out, through Teflon, Scotchgard, 
Stainmaster, and other industrial and agricultural fluorinated products is 
practically unmeasurable. 



FOREWORD 



ix 



Certainly the evidence Bryson presents in this book should cause 
those charged with protecting public health to demand answers about 
the developmental, reproductive, and functional role of fluorine in all 
living organisms. A lack of data on the safety of a product is not proof 
of safety. Evidence has only recently surfaced that prenatal exposure 
to certain fluorinated chemicals is dangerous, often fatal at high doses, 
and that — even at extremely low levels — such exposure can 
undermine the development of the brain, the thyroid, and the 
metabolic system. This evidence surfaced because industrial fluorine 
chemicals were suddenly being discovered in human and wildlife 
tissue everywhere they were looked for on earth. As a result, the U.S. 
Environmental Protection Agency ( EPA) began to press the 
manufacturers of these products for data on their safety. It is no 
wonder that such chemicals never made it on the list of known 
endocrine disrupters, chemicals that undermine development and 
function. The studies were never done, or if they were, they were not 
available to the public. It is time that these chemicals, at the 
cumulative concentrations they are found in the environment, be tested 
thoroughly for their developmental, reproductive, and endocrine 
effects. 

Whether or not Bryson's nuclear-bomb connection is ever con- 
firmed without a doubt, this book demonstrates that there is still much 
that needs to be considered about the continued use of fluorine in 
future production and technology. The nuclear product that required 
the use of fluorine ultimately killed 65,000 people outright in one 
sortie over Japan. The actual number of others since then and in 
generations to come who will have had their health insidiously 
undermined by artificial exposure to fluorides and other fluorine 
chemicals with half-lives estimated in geologic time may well exceed 
that of the atom bomb victims millions and millions of times over. 

Dr. Theo Colborn, coauthor of Our Stolen Future: 
Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and 

Survival? 
A Scientific Detective Story (1996) 



Note on Terminology 



THE TERMS fluorine and fluoride should not be confused in a book about 
chemical toxicity. Fluorine is an element, one of our planets building 
blocks, an especially tiny atom that sits at the summit of the periodic table. 
Its lordly location denotes an unmatched chemical potency that is a 
consequence of its size and structure. The nine positively charged protons 
at the atoms core get little protection from a skimpy miniskirt of electrons. 
As a result, fluorine atoms are unbalanced and dangerous predators, 
snatching electrons from other elements to relieve their core tension. (A 
ravenous hunger for electrons explains why fluorine cuts through steel like 
butter, burns asbestos, and reacts violently with most organic material.)' 

Mercifully, Mother Nature keeps fluorine under lock and key. Because 
of its extreme reactivity, fluorine is usually bound with other elements. 
These compounds are known as salts, or fluorides, the same stuff that they 
put in toothpaste. Yet the chemical potency of fluorides is also dramatic. 
Armed with a captured electron, the toxicity of the negatively charged 
fluoride ion now comes, in part, from its tiny size. (Ionic means having 
captured or surrendered an electron). Like a midget submarine in a harbor 
full of battleships, fluoride ions can get close to big molecules — like 
proteins or DNA — where their negative charge packs a mighty wallop that 
can wreak havoc, forming powerful bonds with hydrogen, and 
interfering with the normal fabric of such biological molecules.' 

However — and please stay with me here, I promise it gets easier 
— somewhat confusingly, the words fluorine and fluoride are some-times 
used interchangeably. A fluoride compound is often referred to, generically, 
as fluorine. (For example, the Fluorine Lawyers Committee was a group of 
corporate attorneys concerned about the medical and legal dangers from a 
great range of different industrial "fluorides" spilling from company 
smokestacks.) 

In these pages Ive tried to be clear when Im referring to the element 
fluorine or to a compound, a fluoride. And because different fluoride 
compounds often have unique toxicities, where relevant or 



NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY 



Xi 



possible, I have also given the compounds specific name. Mostly, 
however, for simplicity s sake, I have followed convention and used 
the shorthand fluoride when referring to the element and its multiple 
manifestations, a procedure approved and used by the U.S. National 
Academy of Sciences.' 



Acknowledgements 



This book owes a debt of gratitude to many. First is my wife, Molly, whose 
love and encouragement pushed me to the starting line and carried me 
across the finish. My first encounter with fluoride came as a BBC radio 
journalist working in New York in 1993, when I was asked to find an 
"American angle" on water fluoridation. Ralph Nader put me in touch with 
scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who opposed 
fluoridation) As I followed that story, I met the medical writer Joel 
Griffiths. His investigative article "Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalist 
Ploy" in the fall 1992 issue of the magazine Covert Action Information 
Bulletin is a masterful and detailed account of how fluoride is primarily an 
industrial and environmental story. Griffiths reported how vested 
economic interests were behind the earliest suggestions that fluoride be 
added to water, while those same interests for decades had assiduously 
suppressed information about fluorides destructive effects on health and 
environment. Griffiths paradigm-shifting story was my starting gun and, as 
my Manhattan neighbor, I leant heavily on his reporting, interviews, 
documents, interpretation and the gentle friendship of him and his wife 
Barbara as I wrote this book. Librarians are foot soldiers of democracy, and 
a legion of them sacked archives for me from Tennessee to Washington 
State and from Denmark to London. Everywhere I was met with eager help 
digging out dusty files and courteous answers to the most foolish of 
questions. Special thanks to my favorite Metallica fan, Billie Broaddus, at 
the University of Cincinnati Medical Heritage Center, Marjorie Ciarlante 
at the National Archives in Washington, DC, and Donald Jerne at the 
Danish National Library of Science and Medicine. The book's spine is the 
authority of the many workers, scientists, and public officials who gave so 
freely of their time. Particular gratitude to Albert Burgstahler of the 
University of Kansas, the EPA's J. William Hirzy, Robert J. Carton, Phyllis 
J. Mullenix, Kathleen M. Thiessen of SENES Oak Ridge Inc., and Robert F. 
Phalen of the University 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 



of California at Irvine, who each spent long hours reviewing documents 
and medical studies for me. 

I had the good fortune to serve an apprenticeship in the 1980s with the 
late Jonathan Kwitny, one of the nations top investigative reporters. From 
his hospital bed, weak from radiation treatment, he encouraged me. This is 
your book, he said. I was helped with financial support from the Fund for 
Investigative Journalism, Inc., and the Institute for Public Affairs. A 
bouquet to Dan Simon at Seven Stories Press, who clapped his hands in 
glee when told he'd be taking on the great industrial trusts of America. 
Special thanks to Lexy Bloom and Ruth Hein for their critical and 
conscientious editing; to George Miirer, Anna Lui, Chris Peterson, and 
India Amos for wrestling this octopus to the printer; and to the entire staff 
at Seven Stories Press for their passion and commitment. 

Many helped in myriad other ways. This book is theirs, too. Gwen 
Jaworzyn, Janet Michel, Bette Hileman, USA Today and Peter Eisler, 
George Mavridis, Felicity Bryson and Vincent Gerin, Ruth Miller at the 
Donora Historical Society, Anne-Lise Gotzsche, Barbara Griffiths, 
Anthony and Nancy Thompson and family, Basil and Anne Henderson, 
Joan-Ellen and Alex Zucker, Nina and David Altschil-ler, Bill and Janney 
Murtha, Tom Webster, Naomi Flack, Ken Case, Bob Woffinden, Traude 
Sadtler, Gordon Thompson, Clifford and Russ Honicker, Jacqueline O. 
Kittrell, Ellie Rudolph, Robert Hall, Martha Bevis, John Marks, Chris 
Trepal, Carol Patton, Gar Smith at Earth Island Journal, Lennart Krook, 
Danny Moses at Sierra Club Books, Andreas Schuld, Erwin Rose and 
family, Roberta Baskin, the Connett family, Colin Beavan, Sam Roe, Karin 
and Hans Hendrik Roholm, Eleanor Krinsky, Allen Kline, Bill and Gladys 
Shempp ( who put me up in their home in Donora one night), Elizabeth 
Ramsay, Lynne Page Snyder, and Peter Meiers, whom I never met nor 
spoke with but whose splendid research led me to the papers of Charles F. 
Kettering. 

Thank you all. 



Introduction 



A Clear and Present Danger 



Warning: Keep out of reach of children under 6 years of age. If you 
accidentally swallow more than used for brushing, get medical help or 
contact a Poison Control Center right away. 

NEXT TIME YOU confront yourself in the bathroom mirror, mouth full 
of foam, take another look at that toothpaste tube. Most of us associate 
fluoride with the humdrum issue of better teeth and the promised fewer 
visits to the dentist. Yet the story of how fluoride was added to our 
toothpaste and drinking water is an extraordinary, almost fantastic tale. 
The plot includes some of the most spec tacular events in human 
affairs — the explosion of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, for example. Many 
of the principal characters are larger than life, such as the "father of public 
relations" Edward L. Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew, who was until 
now more famous for his scheme to persuade women to smoke cigarettes.' 
And the twists and turns of the fluoride story are propelled by nothing less 
than the often grim requirements of accumulating power in the industrial 
era — the same raw power that is at the beating heart of the American 
Century. 

Fluoride lies at the elemental core of some of the greatest fortunes that 
the world has ever seen, the almost unimaginable wealth of the Mellons of 
Pittsburgh and the DuPonts of Delaware. And no wonder the warning on 
the toothpaste tube is so dramatic. The same potent chemical that is used 
to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, to prepare Sarin nerve gas, and to 
wrestle molten steel and aluminum from the earth's ore is what we give to 
our children 



INTRODUCTION XV 



first thing in the morning and last thing at night, flavored with peppermint, 
strawberry, or bubble gum. 

Fluoride is so muscular a chemical that it has become a lifeblood of 
modern industry, pumped hotly each day through innumerable factories, 
refineries, and mills. Fluoride is used to produce high-octane gasoline; to 
smelt such key metals as aluminum, steel, and beryllium; to enrich 
uranium; to make computer circuit boards, pesticides, ski wax, refrigerant 
gases, Teflon plastic, carpets, waterproof clothing, etched glass, bricks and 
ceramics, and numerous drugs, such as Prozac and Cipro. 

Fluoride's use in dentistry is a sideshow by comparison. But its use in 
dentistry helps industry, too. How does it work? Call it elemental public 
relations. Fluoride is so potent a chemical that it's also a grave 
environmental hazard and a potential workplace poison. So, for the 
industry-sponsored scientists who first promoted fluoride's use in dentistry, 
linking the chemical to better teeth and stoutly insisting that, in low doses, 
it had no other health effect helped to change fluorides image from poison 
to panacea, deflecting attention from the injury that factory fluoride 
pollution has long wreaked on workers, citizens, and nature. 

Hard to swallow? Maybe not. The face-lift performed on fluoride more 
than fifty years ago has fooled a lot of people. Instead of conjuring up the 
image of a crippled worker or a poisoned forest, we see smiling children. 
Fluoride's ugly side has almost entirely escaped the public gaze. Historians 
have failed to record that fluoride pollution was the biggest single legal 
worry facing the atomic-bomb program following World War II. 
Environmentalists are often unaware that since World War II, fluoride has 
been the most damaging poison spilling from factory smokestacks and was, 
at one point during the cold war, blamed for more damage claims against 
industry than all twenty other major air pollutants combined. And it was 
fluoride that may have been primarily responsible for the most notorious 
air pollution disaster in U.S. history — the 1948 Halloween nightmare that 
devastated the mill town of Donora, Pennsylvania — which jump-started 
the U.S. environmental movement.' 

It's the same story today: more happy faces. Yet we are exposed to 
fluoride from more sources than ever. We consume the chemical from 
water and toothpaste, as well as from processed foods made 



xvi 



INTRODUCTION 



with fluoridated water and fluoride-containing chemicals. We are exposed 
to fluorine chemicals from often-unrecognized sources, such as 
agricultural pesticides, stain-resistant carpets, fluorinated drugs, and such 
packaging as microwavable popcorn bags and hamburger wrappers, in 
addition to industrial air pollution and the fumes and dust inhaled by many 
workers inside their factories. 

Fluorides double-fisted trait of bringing out the worst in other 
chemicals makes it especially bad company. While a common air pollutant, 
hydrogen fluoride, is many times more toxic than better-known air 
pollution villains, such as sulfur dioxide or ozone, it "synergistically" 
boosts the toxicity of these pollutants as well. Does fluoride added to our 
drinking water similarly increase the toxicity of the lead, arsenic, and other 
pollutants that are routinely found in our water supply? As we shall see, 
getting answers to such questions from the federal government, even after 
fifty years of endorsing water fluoridation, can prove impossible. 

By the mid-193os European scientists had already linked fluoride to a 
range of illnesses, including breathing problems, central-nervous-system 
disorders, and especially an array of arthritis-like musculoskeletal 
problems.' But during the cold war, in one of the greatest medical vanishing 
acts of the twentieth century, fluoride was systematically removed from 
public association with ill health by researchers funded by the U.S. military 
and big corporations. In Europe excess exposure to fluoride produced a 
medical condition described as "poker back" or "crippling skeletal 
fluorosis" among fac tory workers. But the chemical somehow behaved 
differently when it crossed the Atlantic, the industry-funded researchers 
implied, failing to produce such disability in the United States. It was a 
deceit, as we shall see: scientific fraud on a grand and global scale; a 
lawyerly ruse to escape liability for widespread worker injury; a courtroom 
hustle made possible and perpetuated by the suppression of medical 
evidence and by occasional perjury. 

Your history is all mixed up, say supporters of water fluorida-tion. The 
story of how fluoride was added to our toothpaste and water is a separate 
history, unrelated to fluoride's use in industry, they maintain. But there is 
only one story, not two. The tale of the dental wonder chemical and the 
mostly secret account of how industry and the U.S. military helped to 
create and polish that 



INTRODUCTION 



xvn 



public image are braided too closely to distinguish between them. The 
stories merge completely in the conduct of two of the most senior 
American scientists who led the promotion of water fluo-ridation in 
the 19405 and 1950S, Dr. Harold Carpenter Hodge and Dr. Robert 
Arthur Kehoe. 

Don't blame the dentists. They were taught that fluoride is good for 
teeth. Few realize that Dr. Hodge, the nation's leading fluoride 
researcher who trained a generation of dental school deans in the 
19506 and 1960S, was the senior wartime toxicologist for the Man- 
hattan Project. There he helped choreograph the notorious human 
radiation experiments in which hospital patients were injected with 
plutonium and uranium — without their knowledge or consent — in 
order to study the toxicity of those chemicals in humans. Hodge was 
similarly charged with studying fluoride toxicity. Building the worlds 
first atomic bomb had required gargantuan amounts of fluoride. So, 
for example, on behalf of the bomb makers he covertly monitored one 
of the nation's first public water fluoridation experiments. While the 
citizens of Newburgh, New York, were told that fluoride would reduce 
cavities in their children, secretly blood and tissue samples from 
residents were sent to his atomic laboratory for study.' 

Some dentists are unaware that much of the fluoride added to 
drinking water today in the United States is actually an industrial 
waste, "scrubbed" from the smokestacks of Florida phosphate fer- 
tilizer mills to prevent it from damaging livestock and crops in the 
surrounding countryside. In a sweetheart deal these phosphate com- 
panies are spared the expense of disposing of this "fluosilicic acid" in a 
toxic waste dump. Instead, the acid is sold to municipalities, shipped 
in rubber-lined tanker trucks to reservoirs across North America and 
injected into drinking water for the reduction of cavities in children. 
(So toxic are the contents of the fluoride trucks that in the aftermath of 
the September II, zoos, terrorist attack, authorities were alerted to keep 
a watchful eye on road shipments of the children's tooth-decay 
reducer.) 8 

"I had no idea where the fluoride was coming from until the 
anti-fluoridationists pointed it out to me, Dr. Hardy Limeback, the 
head of Preventative Dentistry at the University of Toronto, Canada, 
and a former leading fluoridation supporter, told me. I said, You have 
got to be wrong. That is not possible! 



xviii 



INTRODUCTION 



Those same phosphate manufacturers were members of an influential 
group of industries that sponsored Dr. Robert Kehoe s fluoride research at 
the University of Cincinnati during the 1940s and 1950s. Kehoe is better 
known today for his career-long defense of the safety of adding lead to 
gasoline (now discredited). But he was also a leading figure reassuring 
citizens and scientists of the safety of industrial fluoride and water 
fluoridation, while burying information about the chemical s toxic effects 
and privately sharing doubts with his corporate sponsors about the safety of 
even tiny amounts of the chemical. 9 

Not surprisingly, peering behind the fifty-year-old facade of smiling 
children with rows of picket-fence-white teeth is difficult. Industry is 
reluctant to have its monument to fluoride safety blackened or its role in 
dental mythmaking explored. Several of the archives I visited had gaping 
holes or missing documents, and some were closed entirely. And many 
scientists are reluctant to speak critically about fluoride — mindful of the 
fate of researchers who have questioned the government line. Scientists 
have been fired for their refusal to back down from their questions about 
the safety of fluoride, blackballed by industry, or smeared by propagandists 
hired by the U.S. Public Health Service and the American Dental 
Asso-ciation. 10 "Bodies litter the field," one senior dental researcher told 
me when he learned that I was writing a book on fluoride. 

Myths are powerful things. Mention of fluoride evokes a skeptically 
cocked eyebrow from liberals and conservatives alike and an almost 
reflexive mention of the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove. The 
hilarious portrayal of General Jack D. Ripper as a berserk militarist 
obsessed with Communists adding fluoride to the nation's water became a 
cultural icon of the cold war — and perhaps the movie's most famous scene. 
(Today Nile Southern, the son of Dr. Strangelove's screenwriter, Terry 
Southern, remarks that the news that U.S. military and industrial 
interests — not Communists — promoted water fluoridation is "just 
shocking. Terry and Stanley [ Kubrick] would have been horrified by it.")" 

The media caricature was largely false. The national grassroots struggle 
against water fluoridation was a precursor of todays environmental 
movement, with multicolored hues of political affiliation. It was led by 
veteran scientists with distinguished careers safeguard- 



INTRODUCTION 



xix 



ing public health, including the doctor who warned the nation about 
the dangers of cigarette smoking and the risk from allergic reaction to 
penicillin. Yet instead of being seen as medical pioneers and 
minutemen, warning of the encroachment of industrial poisons, 
antifluoridationists are portrayed as unscientific and isolationist the 
modern equivalent of believing that the earth is flat. 

It is the U.S. medical establishment that is out on a limb, say crit ics. 
Adding to water a chemical so toxic that it was once used as rat poison 
was a uniquely American idea and is, increasingly, a lone American 
practice. Most European countries do not add fluoride to their water. 
Several nations have long since discontinued the practice, 
doubting its safety and worth." 

Fluoride may help teeth, but the evidence is not overwhelming. 
Although rates of dental decay have fallen significantly in the United 
States since the 194os, similar improvements have been seen in 
countries where fluoride is not added to the water. Improved dental 
care, good nutrition, and the use of antibiotics may explain the 
parallel improvement. A largely sympathetic official review of 
fluoridation by the British government in 2000 found that most 
studies of the effectiveness of fluoridated water were of moderate 
quality and that water fluoridation may be responsible for 15 percent 
fewer cavities." Thats a far cry from the 65 percent reductions 
promised by the early promoters of fluoride. With revelations that 
such health problems as central nervous system effects, arthritis, and 
the risk of bone cancer were minimized or concealed entirely from 
the public by early promoters of fluoride, the possible benefit of a 
handful of better teeth might not be worth running the risk. How 
many cavities would have to be saved to justify the death of one man 
from osteosarcoma?" asked the late Dr. John Colquhoun, the former 
chief dental officer of Auckland, New Zealand, and a fluoride 
promoter turned critic. 

"I did not realize the toxicity of fluoride," said Dr. Limeback, the 
Canadian. I had taken the word of the public health dentists, the 
public health physicians, the USPHS, the USCDC, the ADA, the CDA 
[Canadian Dental Association] that fluoride was safe and effective 
without actually investigating it myself. 

Even the theory of how fluoride works has changed. The CDC no 
longer argues that fluoride absorbed from the stomach via 



XX INTRODUCTION 



drinking water helps teeth. Instead, the argument goes, fluoride strikes at 
dental decay from outside the tooth, or topically, where, among other 
effects, it attacks the enzymes in cavity-causing bacteria. Drinking 
fluoridated water is still important, according to the CDC, because it bathes 
the teeth in fluoride-enhanced saliva — a cost-effective way of reaching 
poorer families who may not have a balanced diet, access to a dentist, or the 
regular habit of brushing with fluoride toothpaste.' 

But swallowing treated water allows fluoride into our bones and blood, 
where it may be harmful to other parts of the body, say critics. If fluoride 
can kill enzymes in tooth bacteria, its potentially crippling effects on other 
enzymes — the vital chemical catalysts that regulate much biological 
activity — must be considered.' 

When I investigated [such questions] I said, "This is crazy." Lets take it 
out of the water because it is harming so many people — [not] simply the 
dental fluorosis [the white mottling on teeth caused by fluoride], but now 
we are seeing bone problems and possibly cancer and thyroid problems. If 
you are really targeting the poor people, lets give toothpaste out at the food 
banks. Do something other than fluoridate the water supply," said Dr. 
Limeback. Then [the fluoride promoters] kept saying, Well, it is cost 
effective. That is a load of crap-it is cost effective because they are using 
toxic waste, for crying out loud! 

History tells us that overturning myths is rarely easy. But we have been 
down this path before. The fluoride story is similar to the fables about lead, 
tobacco, and asbestos, in which medical accomplices helped industry to 
hide the truth about these substances for generations. Fluoride workers 
share a tragic fate with the souls who breathed beryllium, uranium, and 
silica in the workplace. Endless studies that assured workers that their 
factories and mines were safe concealed the simple truth that thousands of 
people were being poisoned and dying painful early deaths from these 
chemicals. So if this tale of how fluorides public image was privately 
laundered sounds eerily familiar, maybe its because the very same 
professionals and institutions who told us that fluoride was safe said much 
the same about lead, asbestos, and DDT or persuaded us to smoke more 
tobacco. 



INTRODUCTION 



XXI 



Lulled by half a century of reassurances from supporters of fluoride 
in the public health establishment, many doctors today have no idea of 
the symptoms of fluoride poisoning. A silent killer may stalk us in our 
ignorance. There is a black hole out there, in terms of the public and 
scientific knowledge, says former industry toxicologist Dr. Phyllis 
Mullenix. There is really no public health issue that could impact a 
bigger population. I dont think there is an element of this society that 
is not impacted by fluoride. It is very far-reaching and it is very 
disturbing." 

Fifty years after the U.S. Public Health Service abruptly reversed course 
during the darkest days of the cold war — and endorsed artificial water 
fluoridation — it is time to recognize the folly, hubris, and secret agendas 
that have shackled us too long, poisoning our water, choking our air, and 
crippling workers. It is time, as the Quakers ask in life, to speak truth to 
power. Good science can sharpen the tools for change, but it will be public 
opinion and citizen action that strike those shackles free. 



Major Figures On The Fluoride Story 



edward L. bernays . A propagandist and the self-styled father of public 
relations, Bernays was Sigmund Freud s nephew. Among his clients were 
the U.S. military, Alcoa, Procter and Gamble, and Allied Signal. On 
behalf of big tobacco companies he persuaded American women to smoke 
cigarettes. He also promoted water fluoridation, consulting on strategy for 
the National Institute of Dental Research. 

Gerald judy COX. A researcher at the Mellon Institute in the 1930s, 
where he held a fellowship from the Aluminum Company of America. 
Following Frarys (see below) suggestion, Cox reported that fluoride gave 
rats cavity-resistant teeth and in 1939 made the first public proposal to add 
fluoride to public water supplies. 

henry trendley dean. The U.S. Public Health Service researcher 
who studied dental fluorosis in areas of the United States where fluoride 
occurred naturally in the water supply. His fluorine-caries hypothesis 
suggested that fluoride made teeth cavity-resistant but also caused 
unsightly dental mottling. Worried about toxicity, Dean opposed adding 
fluoride to water in Newburgh, New York, the site of the nations 
first-planned water fluoridation experiment. In 1948 Dean became the first 
director of the National Institute of Dental Research (NIDR) and, in 
1953, a top official of the American Dental Association. 

OSCAR R. ewing . A top Wall Street lawyer for the Aluminum Company 
of America. As Federal Security Agency administrator for the Truman 
administration with jurisdiction over the Public Health Service, it was 
Ewing who, in 1950, endorsed public water fluoridation for the United 
States. 



MAJOR FIGURES 



FRANCIS COWLES FRARY. As Director of Research at the Aluminum 
Company of America from 1918, Frary was one of the most powerful 
science bureaucrats in the United States and grappled with the issue of 
fluoride emissions from aluminum smelters. It was Frary who made early 
suggestions to Gerald Cox, a researcher at the Mellon Institute, that 
fluoride might make strong teeth. 

GENERAL LESLIE R. GROVES. Head of the U.S. Army Corps of 
Engineers' Manhattan Project to build the world's first atomic bomb. 

HAROLD CARPENTER HODGE. A biochemist and toxicologist at the 
University of Rochester who investigated fluoride for the U.S. Armys 
Manhattan Project, where he also supervised experiments in which 
unsuspecting hospital patients were injected with uranium and plutonium. 
After the war Hodge chaired the National Research Council s Committee 
on Toxicology and became the leading scientific promoter of water 
fluoridation in the United States during the cold war. 

DUDLEY A. IRWIN. Alcoa s medical director who helped oversee Robert 
Kehoes fluoride research at the Kettering Laboratory, and who met 
personally with top fluoride researchers at the National Institute of Dental 
Research (NIDR) following the verdict in the Martin air-pollution trial. 

ROBERT A. KEHOE . As the Director of the Kettering Laboratory of 
Applied Physiology at the University of Cincinnati, Kehoe was the 
leading defender in the United States of the safety of leaded gasoline. 
Guided by a group of corporate attorneys known as the Fluorine Lawyers 
Committee, Kehoe similarly defended fluoride on behalf of a group of 
corporations that included DuPont, Alcoa, and U.S. Steel, all of which 
faced lawsuits for industrial fluoride pollution. 

EDWARD J. L ARGENT. A researcher at the Kettering Laboratory who 
defended corporations accused of fluoride pollution and spent a career 
negating the fluoride warnings of the Danish scientist Kaj 



xxiv 



MAJOR FIGURES 



Roholm. Largent exposed his wife and son to hydrogen fluoride in a 
laboratory gas chamber. 

NICHOLAS C. LEONE. The head of medical investigations at the federal 
governments NIDR who was in close communication with industry s 
Fluorine Lawyers and who, following the 1955 Martin verdict, met with 
Alcoa s Dudley Irwin and the Kettering Laboratory s Robert Kehoe to 
discuss how government water fluoridation safety studies could help 
industry. 

WILLIAM J. MARCUS . A senior toxicologist in the EPAs Office of 
Drinking Water. In 1992, after he protested what he described as the 
systematic downgrading of the results of the government's study of cancer 
and fluoride, he was fired. A federal judge later ruled that he had been fired 
because of his scientific opinions on fluoride and ordered him reinstated. 

PAUL AND VERLA MARTIN. Oregon farmers who were poisoned by 
fluoride from a Reynolds Metals aluminum plant. Their precedent-setting 
court victory in 1955 sparked emergency meetings between fluoride 
industry representatives and senior officials from the National Institute of 
Dental Research and launched a crash program of laboratory experiments 
at the Kettering Laboratory to prove industrial fluoride pollution "safe." 

PHYLLIS J. MULLENIX. A leading neurotoxicologist hired by the 
Forsyth Dental Center in Boston to investigate the toxicity of materials 
used in dentistry. In i 994i after her research indicated that fluoride was 
neurotoxic, she was fired. 

KAJ ELI ROHOLM. The Danish scientist who in 1937 published the book 
Fluorine Intoxication, an encyclopedic study of fluoride pollution and 
poisoning. He opposed giving fluoride to children. 

PHILIP SADTLER. The third-generation son of a venerable Philadelphia 
family of chemists, Sadtler gave expert testimony during the 1940s and 
1950s on behalf of farmers and citizens who claimed that they had been 
poisoned by industrial fluoride pollution. He 



MAJOR FIGURES 



XXV 



blamed fluoride for the most notorious air pollution disaster in U.S. history, 
during which two dozen people were killed and several thousand were 
injured in Donora, Pennsylvania, over the Halloween weekend in 1948. 

FRANK L. SEAMANS. A top lawyer for Alcoa, Seamans was also 
head of the group of senior attorneys known as the Fluorine Lawyers 
Committee, which represented big corporations in cases of alleged 
industrial fluoride pollution. 

GEORGE L. WALDBOTT. A doctor and scientist and a leading 
expert on the health effects of environmental pollutants, Waldbott's 
research in the 19505 and 196os on his own patients indicated that 
many people were uniquely sensitive to very small doses of fluoride. 
He founded the International Society for Fluoride Research and was a 
leader of the international and domestic opposition to water 
fluoridation. 

COLONEL STAFFORD L. WARREN. Head of the Manhattan 
Projects Medical Section. 

EDWARD RAY WEIDLEIN. Director of the Mellon Institute, where 
Cox carried out his studies. 



1 



Through the Looking Glass 



At the children's entrance to the prestigious Forsyth Dental Center in Boston, 
there is a bronze mural from a scene in Alice in Wonderland. The mural 
makes scientist Phyllis Mullenix laugh. One spring morning, when she was 
the head of the toxicology department at Forsyth, she walked into the ornate 
and marbled building and, like Alice, stepped through the looking glass. 
That same day in her Forsyth laboratory she made a startling discovery 
and tumbled into a bizarre wonderland where almost no one was who they 
had once appeared to be and nothing in the scientists life would ever be the 
same again. 

AS SHE DROVE alongside the Charles River in the bright August 
sunshine of 1982 for her first day of work at the Forsyth Dental Center in 
Boston, toxicologist Phyllis Mullenix was smiling. She and her husband 
Rick had recently had their second daughter. Her new job promised 
career stability and with it, the realization of a professional dream. 

Since her days as a graduate student Mullenix had been exploring new 
methods for studying the possible harmful effects of small doses of 
chemicals. By 1982 Dr. Mullenix was a national leader in the young 
science of neurotoxicology, measuring how such chemicals affected the 
brain and central nervous system. She and a team of researchers were 
developing a bold new technology to perform those difficult 
measurements more accurately and more quickly than ever before. 
The system was called the Computer Pattern Recognition System. 

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