Ch. 10. The Public Health Service Investigation: the fluoride deception by Christopher Bryson from archive.org

The Public Health Service Investigation 



The big federal investigation now shifted noisily into gear. From 
November 1948 and through the following spring Donora residents were 
bombarded with door-to-door surveys and endless questionnaires from the 
Washington investigators. Public Health Service air sampling vans 
criss-crossed the steel bridge between Webster and Donora. The town hall 
sprouted an air monitor. 

Donora residents were elated. They were confident that Harry Truman s 
Public Health Service would deliver fair deal answers about the Donora 
smog. They also hoped that the federal investigation would help resolve 
thirty years of community conflict with U.S. Steel. Many residents saw the 
disaster of 1948 as simply the most recent and violent insult the 
community had suffered from industry. 

When the Donora zinc works opened in 1916 it was the biggest of its 
kind in the world, and one of the dirtiest. The plant used coal and gas to 
roast the zinc ore and drive impurities into the air. Ironically, and too late 
for Donora, that technology was almost immediately superceded in newer 
plants by much cleaner technology, which used electricity to melt the ore.' 
But U.S. Steel was not prepared to abandon its expensive Donora 
investment. Zinc was fetching high prices as a vital ingredient in munitions 
for World War I, which was then raging in Europe. 

Each day the Donora works billowed out giant clouds of oily and 
foul-smelling smoke that drifted on the winds west across Donora or east 
into the town of Webster. Local families were outraged by their 
foul-breathed neighbor. Webster's farmers and small holders 



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had chosen the pristine river valley for its natural beauty and the rich soils 
long before the zinc works had arrived. Some farmers had been on the same 
land since the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Now toxic smoke filled their 
homes and they watched in horror as the farmland above their town grew 
barren, rutted gullies slicing at the balding hillsides. 

The children of Donora and Webster were born into a near-eternal 
darkness of smoke and fumes, frolicking on land defoliated by chemical 
poisons.' Even the dead could not rest. Industry's fumes laid waste to 
Donora's lovely Civil War-era Gilmore cemetery. As the rootless earth 
eroded down the side of the valley, gravestones toppled and observers 
reported seeing dogs make off with human bones.' A 1941 novel by a 
former Donora steelworker, Thomas Bell, recalls a view of the zinc works 
from the Webster side of the river: 

Freshly charged, the zinc smelting furnaces, crawling with 
thousands of small flames, yellow, blue, green, filled the valley 
with smoke. Acrid and poisonous, worse than anything a steel 
mill belched forth, it penetrated everywhere, making 
automobile headlights necessary in Webster's streets, setting the 
river boat pilots to cursing God, and destroying every living 
thing on 
the hills. 4 

Webster families and some Donora supporters began to organize. The 
first health-damage suits against the zinc plant were filed in 1918. Marie 
Burkhardt, a Donora resident since 1904, told a jury that since the plant's 
opening she had suffered chest pains, a hacking cough, the loss of her voice, 
and headaches. The jury found her complaints plausible, and so did an 
appeals court judge. Burkhardt won a judgment of $500 against the zinc 
plant. Suits like Burkhardt's would continue, angry and unabated, until the 
plant closed some forty years later. Although claims in the name of 659 
plaintiffs had totaled $4.5 million in 1935, court victories were rare and 
settlements were usually tiny; residents faced an uphill battle against the 
richest steel company in the world, armed with legions of lawyers to defeat 
and delay the protests.' 



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135 



Suits did not get very far, noted a lifelong Webster resident, Allen 
Kline. He remembered two or three small victories like Burkhardts. In 
one case they got an award of $500. Another won $2500. Mostly people 
got tired of fighting. 

The children of Webster were some of America's earliest environmental 
protesters. Allen Klines name was listed on a lawsuit against U.S. Steel by 
his grandfather when Kline was eight years old. His grandfather, an 
immigrant from Italy, had built their family home in Webster in 1914. He 
owned farmland in the hills above the town. Two years after he constructed 
the family s home, the zinc plant was built. For almost fifty years the Kline 
s home sat directly downwind from the zinc works. Kline remembers a 
1938 visit from distant cousins who lived in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on 
the other side of the state. They were supposed to stay for a week, but 
instead, "They were here for two days," he recalled. "They didn't know 
how we lived under these conditions. . . . We didnt know what it was to 
breathe clean air. 

After the 1948 disaster in Donora a protest group called the Society for 
Better Living took root in Websters treeless soil. The twenty-two-year-old 
Kline became the secretary of the Society, which eventually had about 200 
members. Its slogan: Clean Air and Green Grass. 

For the next decade the Society waged a David-and-Goliath struggle 
with U.S. Steel. Tensions ran high in the community. Many Donora 
workers saw the Society as a threat to their jobs. Several Society officers 
received death threats, reported Kline. "A lot of people made a good living 
at the mill, he added. But the tiny group persisted. Its members held rallies, 
issued Kline's press releases, and even traveled to Washington, DC. Years 
later Kline remembered this Quixotic lobbying trip to the nation s capital. 
The self-described "idealistic" young newspaperman and his band of 
Webster residents had a fantastic notion: why didn't Congress enact 
nationwide laws against air pollution to protect communities such as their 
own? Their Washington pleas fell on deaf ears: "I don't think anybody ever 
knew we were there," said Kline. 

The president of the Society for Better Living, Abe Salapino, and deputy 
Kline grew anxious that spring of 1949. They watched as U.S. Steel 
public -relations men squired federal health officials around 



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town, wining and dining them at local restaurants. We were concerned that 
they were winning the battle on this gastronomical front, said Kline. But 
Salapino owned a local restaurant. Guests came from Pittsburgh for his 
delicious meats and pastries, calling first to make sure that the wind was 
not blowing zinc fumes into the restaurant windows. Salapino and Kline 
now organized a sumptuous meal for the Public Health Service men on 
their final night in Donora, courtesy of the Society for Better Living. You 
couldnt believe this party," said Kline. "We had most of them drunk. We 
decided there is no way we are not going to get a favorable report out of this 
group. 

That summer, shortly before the much-anticipated PHS report was 
released, Allen Kline and other members of the Society for Better Living 
got their own surprise invitation. The president of the American Steel and 
Wire Division of U.S. Steel, Clifford Hood, wanted them to come to 
Pittsburgh for a friendly meeting. Kline was stunned. He had spent the last 
year issuing press releases blaming the company for the Donora deaths and 
complaining about pollution. At the meeting Hood denied that the zinc 
works had caused the disaster, but he conceded that U.S. Steel fumes may 
have damaged some vegetation in the valley. The admission was an 
about-face from the aggressive position the company had long taken in 
court. The meeting then became almost a love session between the two 
adversaries, Kline recalled. President Hood gave the twenty-two-year-old a 
couple of his Havana cigars. I was terribly impressed by him," said Kline. 

The following day the Donora papers reported the goodwill meeting and 
the steel company's promises to reduce smoke from the mills. The Society 
for Better Living was "perfectly convinced" of U.S. Steel's sincerity, the 
newspaper wrote. Kline realized that the meeting had been a 
public -relations stunt, a carrot for his group to improve U.S. Steels image 
in Donora. For the remaining decade of the zinc plants operation, no air 
scrubbers were installed, according to the Society for Better Living.' 

While Clifford Hood was passing out cigars to the Webster envi- 
ronmentalists, behind the scenes his company had hired the powerful 
Pittsburgh law firm of Reed, Smith, Shaw, and McClay, which was 
headquartered in Andrew Mellon s Union Trust bank build- 



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1 37 



ing. For much of the century the firm had been fighting citizens in court 
who claimed that their health and property had been hurt by industrial 
pollution. The well-heeled Pittsburgh lawyers were given new marching 
orders after the disaster: defeat the families of the Donora victims in court 
and escape any legal requirement to clean up the smelter operation. 

Robert Kehoes scientists became the secret weapon of the Pittsburgh 
lawyers, serving as U.S. Steels Trojan horse in Donora, nuz zling close to 
the official PHS investigation, and prying access to the government 
investigation and its confidential data. As a result PHS investigators gave 
Kettering officials samples of autopsy mate rial they had gathered 
immediately after the disaster — information they should not have given out. 
And when two of the Donora dead were exhumed for additional studies in 
March 1949, once again Ket-tering officials joined the PHS doctors around 
the autopsy table.' A former PHS historian, Lynn Page Snyder, calls this 
manipulation of the public trust by Kehoe the "underbelly" of the Donora 
investigation. While gaining broad access to the government investigation, 
Kehoe was privately working with U.S. Steel to shoot down citizen 
lawsuits. 

"Ethically, what was problematic to me was that Kettering officials were 
given slides with lung tissue, and permission was not requested from the 
next of kin of the people who passed away," Snyder remarked. "Some of 
the autopsies were done on people who were dug up after they had been 
interred. And the PHS and the Borough council and the Board of Health 
locally worked carefully with the families of the deceased to convince them 
to dig the bodies back up." Kehoe's access to all this medical data was 
granted, "without informing area residents of the purpose of Ket-tering 
efforts," Snyder added. 

Snyder wrote a detailed study of the Donora disaster as a graduate 
student, and she grew concerned that the federal government's 
investigation had focused on the weather in Donora that weekend, rather 
than on the "incredibly filthy" metal-smelting industries. "I am disturbed 
by the way it is remembered," she said. "I would like to see more 
discussion of the industrial nature of this disaster." 

According to Snyder, PHS officials were willing collaborators in efforts 
to suppress information about industry s role in the deaths. 



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When Kehoe prepared U.S. Steels medicolegal defense against the Donora 
survivors, for example, he asked his government connections for 
information on the exact sequence of deaths and the time and location in 
which they occurred. The chief of the PHS s Division of Industrial Hygiene, 
J. G. Townsend, wrote back two weeks later giving Kehoe the government 
data that plotted the onset of the sickness in Donora during the disaster. 
And a second special table of data, correlating smog affliction with 
preexisting illness, was sent to Kettering and marked by the PHS "This 
information is CONFIDENTIAL and is submitted to Doctor Ashe for his 
personal use only.'" 

Snyder says that those statistics, which were reworked by Kehoe s team 
to narrowly define a so-called smog syndrome, helped to discount the role 
of the disaster in the many hundreds of chronic illnesses or deaths in the 
smog's long medical aftermath. Many of the lawsuits filed against U.S. 
Steel involved such cases. That particular information was helpful to 
William Ashe, Snyder pointed out, so that the Kettering people could 
construct a legal argument that ruled out a number of claims as being 
unrelated to the smog. 

The evidence that the federal government had secretly cooperated with 
Kehoe disturbed Snyder. It is collusion, she remarked. " I read that memo 
[the one marked "confidential"] as evidence of a public health service 
person collaborating in the case being prepared by Kettering against the 
plaintiffs — the citizens in Donora and in Webster — without their 
knowledge." Snyder added, "The information about the illnesses and the 
times of onset belonged to the citizens, just like the autopsy material. It was 
not information that ought to have been given to a private interest preparing 
[to defend a lawsuit] against them." 

In October 1949 the PHS report on Donora was finally released. It was 
an enormous disappointment to the victims families. They had hoped it 
would explain what poison killed their relatives that night and where it had 
come from. The 173-page government document, Public Health Service 
Bulletin 306, did neither. "They produced a report which looks the size of 
the Holy Bible," said Allen Kline, and came to virtually no conclusions. 

The government verdict that no single substance was responsible for 
the Donora deaths, however, was a triumph for the U.S. 



THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE INVESTIGATION 



Steel Company. The reports emphasis on the bad weather effectively 
endorsed the same argument made by the U.S. Steel lawyers, that the 
disaster was not foreseeable and therefore an act of god. Blaming the 
weather had opened the door for a legal escape act. The reports failure to 
identify which factory or chemical had caused the deaths completed the 
corporate getaway. The report did not improve the prospects of the town 
one whit, noted Lynne Snyder. 

Oscar Ewing — Alcoa s former chief counsel, friend of President Truman, 
and head of the Federal Security Agency — wrote the intro duction to the 
official final report of the Donora investigation. He was silent about his 
past corporate loyalty to Alcoa. He was silent about the fact that the 
international aluminum industry had been fighting lawsuits alleging 
fluoride damage from air pollution for forty years. And he was silent about 
the sixty-three people who had been killed in 1930 in the Meuse Valley air 
pollution disaster in Belgium. Instead, Ewing fatuously declared that air 
pollution was "a new and heretofore unsuspected source of danger." 
Donora had revealed the almost completely unknown effects on health of 
many types of air pollution existing today, he added. 

It was a rank Washington smokescreen. Alcoa had spent much of World 
War II and its aftermath grappling with massive lawsuits and citizen 
protests over fluoride air pollution from aluminum plants.' Oscar Ewing s 
legal colleague Frank B. Ingersoll was a partner in the Pittsburgh law firm 
of Smith, Buchanan, Ingersoll, Rodewald, and Eckert that had fought many 
of those lawsuits on behalf of Alcoa; Frank L. Seamans of the same firm 
would coordinate a national corporate legal defense strategy in the 1950s as 
chairman of the Fluorine Lawyers Committee. 

The PHS report itself, "Air Pollution in Donora, Pa — Epidemiology of 
the Unusual Smog Episode of October 1948, was written by the 
Manhattan Projects wartime fluoride consultant, Helmuth Schrenk. He 
was particularly adamant in his efforts to disqualify fluoride as the killer 
agent. The possibility is slight that toxic concentrations of fluoride 
accumulated during the October 1948 episode," Schrenk wrote. 

The PHS report, however, made no mention of the high fluoride levels 
in Donora vegetation that Kettering researcher Edward Lar-gent had 
gathered during a cloak-and-dagger trip to Donora in the 



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summer of 1949. Kettering s Dr. William Ashe had written a letter of 
introduction for Largent on July it, to the Director of Industrial Relations at 
the Donora Works, Mr. E. Soles: Largent ... will be around Donora for a 
day or two, looking into the problem of the effects of particulate fluorides 
upon foliage and crops. There is no direct relationship between this matter 
and the smog disaster, but there may be an additional problem which could 
cause the company considerable embarrassment. ... I suggest that the 
purpose of his mission be kept entirely to yourself.' 

Philip Sadtler had blamed fluoride for defoliating Donora's trees and 
grass. Largent confirmed high fluoride levels in local vegeta-tion. 12 Why 
the need for Largent's secrecy? 

"It sounds like there was a problem with fluorine emissions and it was 
clandestine because Kettering did not want other people to know about 
it — clear as that," believes Lynn Snyder. "The clandestine part fits in with 
the rest of their activities. If they told people like a plant manager, word 
would get out, and Phil Sadtler's theory would get more credence. 

Schrenks PHS report also dismissed the numerous medical accounts of 
long-term health problems caused by air pollution in Donora and the 
common experience of the residents who invariably became sicker when 
the smelter fumes were trapped in the valley. And critics found the 
government report to be laden with mathematical errors, especially when it 
came to determining fluoride emissions. The report guessed that 210 tons 
of coal burned in homes emitted 30 pounds of fluoride, but 213 tons burned 
in the mills gave off only 4 pounds. "No possible reason for the difference 
is offered," said the physician and researcher Dr. Frederick B. Exner. On 
page 104 of the report, Exner pointed out, waste gas from the blast furnace 
contains 4.6 mg of fluoride per cubic meter; on page 108 it contains 
one-tenth as much. "An elaborate piece of hocus-pocus," concluded Exner. 
"Incompetent, irrelevant and immaterial to prove anything except how 
easily people — and I mean those who call themselves scientists — can be 
duped.' 

The report made no effort to explain why Donora residents were so 
terribly injured that weekend while the nearby town of Mones-sen, which 
had a steel works and the same bad weather, had been relatively unscathed. 
But Monessen had no zinc works, residents noted. A local newspaper 
editorialized that the relationship between 



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141 



the Donora Zinc Works and the smog was something that no 
investigation is necessary to prove. All you need is a reasonably good 
pair of eyes.' 

Allen Kline agreed. We thought it was common sense that it was 
the zinc works. That is what was different in Donora. 

Sadtler knew he could not compete with the Pubic Health Service. 
"When the US government says that something is sulfur dioxide and 
not fluorine, he said, then people are taking their word and not my 
word." 

Scientist Kathleen Thiessen is an expert on risk analysis and has 
written about the health effects of fluoride for the U.S. Environmental 
Protection Agency. For this book she reviewed many of the 
confidential and unpublished Kettering documents and compared 
them with the official published conclusion by the Public Health 
Service on the Donora disaster.' Unlike the PHS report, Thiessen 
concluded that, judging from the information included in the 
Ket-tering documents, fatal quantities of fluoride could have certainly 
have been present in the valley during the disaster weekend, posing a 
lethal risk to the elderly and the infirm. 

To come to this conclusion, Thiessen first made a rough estimate 
of how much air blanketed Donora that weekend. If the Donora valley 
was about 2.5 miles long, between 0.5 and 1 .5 miles wide, and some 
340 feet deep, then between 320 and 96o million cubic meters of air 
lay over the town, trapped by a temperature inversion. The Donora 
steel plant had a daily production capacity of 1,450 tons of steel. 
Thiessen then calculated that, if each ton of steel requires 2 kg of 
fluoride, then as much as 2,900 kg (6,380 pounds) of fluoride could 
have been released per day without emission controls. Trapped by the 
stagnant weather conditions and suspended over Donora, these 
airborne fluoride concentrations could have soared well above the 
concentrations set as industry standard for an 8 hour day. (Addition- 
ally, of course, the zinc plant was belching out fluoride. But without 
surviving data on that plant's daily production capacity, Thiessen was 
not able to make an equivalent calculation for how much fluoride it 
may also have contributed during the disaster.) 

It is not possible, with just the existing documents, to know with 
certainty whether fluoride killed Donora s citizens, concluded 
Thies-sen. Nevertheless, she indicated, her series of calculations show 
that there is the potential that routine releases of fluorine or fluoride, 



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under conditions of little or no air dispersion, could result in air 
concentrations high enough to be dangerous to some individuals in the 
general public. 

Thiessen was unimpressed with the science behind the official PHS 
report. She likened it to similar reports written today, where the intent is to 
obscure the truth, not reveal it. My take was that they did a very fine job 
of writing lots of words in the hopes that nobody would see through to the 
fact that there was not much information there," she said. 

Thiessen was especially skeptical of the governments scientific 
methodology in exonerating fluoride. Months after the disaster the PHS 
investigators measured urine samples in Donora children. The fluoride 
levels were low, and the investigators concluded that fluoride had therefore 
not been a problem during the disaster. It was a ludicrous argument, 
Thiessen explained. "They made a point in their report to say there is 
clearly no evidence of chronic fluoride exposure, but you cannot from that 
say there was no acute exposure on a given weekend six months ago. But 
they tried to do that. You 
cant. 

Today investigators who want to examine how the PHS reached its 
conclusions are stymied. The raw data and records of the governments 
Donora investigation are missing from the U.S. National Archives and 
cannot be found. It is a shameful omission and a shocking breach of public 
trust, particularly as the Donora study was the first federal investigation of 
air pollution. "They may have been thrown out, suggested Snyder, who 
spent five years looking for these federal records. "Someone may have 
decided they were too hot to handle and got rid of them. You have to 
suspect the worst." 

Philip Sadder confirms the worst. 16 Six months after the disaster, U.S. 
Steel and the Public Health Service ran a test in Donora to simulate and 
measure the air pollutants that had been present in the atmosphere at the 
time. Sadtler was in town that day as the zinc and steel plants fired up and 
began billowing their smoke and fumes. He stepped into the mobile 
laboratory where government scientists were monitoring the "test smog." 
"I looked in and the chemist said, "Phil, come on in.' Very friendly," Sadtler 
remembered. "He says, Phil, I know that you are right, but I am not 
allowed to say so. 

The government conclusion — that no single pollutant had caused the 
Donora deaths — helped to checkmate the Donora families who were suing 
U.S. Steel. A more grotesque spectacle quickly followed. 



THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE INVESTIGATION 



As soon as the report was published, Helmuth Schrenk, the fluoride expert 
who had led the governments investigation, switched sides. He literally 
crossed the street from the U.S. Bureau of Mines in Pittsburgh, joined the 
private Mellon Institute as a research director, and signed up as an expert 
courtroom witness for U.S. Steel, ready to testify against the very Donora 
citizens whose devastated city he had just investigated for the U.S. 
government. 

It still makes me angry, said historian Lynne Snyder. For the chief of 
the investigation to immediately make himself avail-able to be an expert 
witness against the plaintiffs of the town is something I would like to have 
information about. Did he receive money from U.S. Steel? Did he receive 
it after he left the employ of PHS?" 

Schrenk joined Robert Kehoe and Harvard University air pollution 
expert Professor Philip Drinker as expert witnesses for U.S. Steel.' The 
one -two punch of a flaccid official investigation and the defection of its 
chief investigator to the side of industry crippled the victims' court case. In 
April 1951, on the eve of the first "test case" trial of smog victim Suzanne 
Gnora, the plaintiffs' lawyer — the former Pennsylvania attorney general, 
Charles Margiotti — settled with U.S. Steel. Facing 160 victim claims 
totaling $4.5 million, U.S. Steel settled for a one-time payment of a quarter 
of a million dollars to be disbursed among families of the dead and injured. 
One-third of the money went to Margiotti. The biggest, richest steel 
corporation in the world admitted no guilt nor accepted any obligation to 
reduce air pollution. 

Allen Kline received a check for $500. Families of the dead garnered 
about $4,000 apiece, less Margiotti's third, Kline remembered. There was 
much anger at the courtroom deal. "We were furious," Kline said. "We 
weren't interested in the suits for money, we were interested in the suits to 
publicize what we considered a very serious health hazard." 

After the settlement the Donora disaster slipped from public attention. 
Philip Sadder s report of fluoride poisoning was almost forgotten. Even 
the Society for Better Living grew tired and gave up fighting the zinc 
works. The whole thing just seemed to fade away," Kline said. I was 
weary of getting nowhere. 

Allen Kline never found out what chemical made him sick that 
weekend nor what killed so many of his fellow townsfolk. Despite 



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CHAPTER TEN 



the fumes, Allen Kline remained in the Webster home that his grandfather 
had built. The newspaperman developed a whole raft of illnesses, including 
a heart problem, diabetes, and a case of arthritis so crippling that he was 
forced into retirement, where an electric elevator chair carried him on rails 
each night upstairs to bed. Kline's daughter, born in the same Webster 
home, died of cancer. When the zinc mill finally closed in 1957 and the air 
over Webster cleared, to Allen Kline it was an epiphany. "I didn't know life 
could be that grand," he said. 

It Was Murder 

NINE YEARS AFTER the disaster, two officials from the U.S. Public 
Health Service, Antonio Ciocco and D. J. Thompson, returned to Donora, 
to work with an air-pollution consultant from the University of Pittsburgh, 
John Rumford. Ciocco and Thompson published data showing that Donora 
citizens who had been sick during the disaster remained at greater risk of 
illness and early death." 1 But John Rumford's explosive findings — of 
fluoride poisoning in Donora — were never published. The suppression of 
the fluoride findings by the government health experts mirrored perfectly 
the evasions and omissions of their PHS colleagues a decade earlier. 
Without alerting the public, Rumford had taken soil measurements from 
eight locations in Donora, including downwind from the steelwork's blast 
furnace. In six of his readings, he found 200-800 parts per million of 
fluoride in soil. Downwind from the blast furnace, however, his two 
readings were 1,600 and 2,500 ppm respectively. Rumford next studied 
health data from the disaster, gathering more firsthand information on 
Donora health complaints and inquiring whether reported illnesses were 
more severe when temperature inversions trapped pollutants in the valley. 
His conclusions were simple. According to a PHS official who examined 
his data, Rumford's basic findings were: 

1 . That there is a relation between month-to-month variation in 

sickness and month-to-month variation in . . . air pollution. 

2. That there is more illness in an area over which fluorides are 

blown from the factory. 



THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE INVESTIGATION 



The suspected fluorosis occurred in the same five -block radius 
downwind from the Donora steel works where half of the disaster dead had 
lived, Rumford reported. His data also showed that cardiovascular 
problems grew worse when the smog gathered in the Donora Valley and 
that former open-hearth steel workers who handled raw fluoride were 
especially affected by arthritis and 
rheumatism. 

At first the new generation of PHS officials seemed excited by 
Rumford's work. The Donora disaster might have a silver lining, they even 
suggested. The health data might offer a road map for a nation struggling to 
chart new policies to combat air pollution and to determine the health 
effects of the most dangerous poisons in the atmosphere. The grim health 
effects of fluoride air pollution were very clear in John Rumford s data, the 
PHS officials saw. Dr. Ciocco liked this part about the fluoride findings, 
reported one of the reviewers of Rumford s work, Nicholas E. Manos, who 
was the Chief Statistician of the PHS s Air Pollution Medical Program. In 
the case of suspected fluorosis, that is, cases of arthritis and rheuma tism, 
Dr. Manos explained, you have a correlation with a specific agent, a 
correlation with the wind trajectory, and also a correlation with the 
presence of those whose occupation places them near the open hearth using 
raw fluoride. 

Similar health problems associated with fluoride air pollution had been 
seen elsewhere in the country, noted Manos. And Dr. Leon O. Emik, the 
Chief of Laboratory Investigations for the PHS Air Pollution Medical 
Program, contemplated initiating a bold nationwide study on fluoride's 
health effects. "Dr. Emik suggested we study mortality from arthritis and 
rheumatism from various cities for possible relation with the frequency of 
fluoride air pollution. We must remember in this connection Mrs. 
Gleeson's findings of an increase in cardiovascular deaths in Florida after 
the influx of plants using fluoride," Manos wrote. (Philip S adder had gone 
to Donora, of course, at the request of Florida farmers battling the 
fluoride-polluting phosphate industry.) 

Instead of pointing a fresh finger at an especially dangerous air pollutant, 
however, John Rumford s fluoride findings remained unpublished. And for 
more than forty years the 1949 Public Health Service report on Donora 
exonerating fluoride has stood as the 



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established account of the most famous air pollution disaster in U.S. 
history. Its critics were largely forgotten, and fluoride slipped almost 
entirely from most public discussion of air pollution. When the fiftieth 
anniversary of the disaster was marked in 1998, no newspaper even 
mentioned fluoride. Philip Sadtler had died two years earlier. At a 
municipal church ceremony in Donora an EPA official mentioned only that 
the long-ago Halloween disaster had shown that pollution can kill people. 
A second EPA official blamed the deaths on "a mix" of sulfur dioxide, 
carbon monoxide, and metal dust. 

The shabby treatment Donora citizens received from their government 
can be attributed, perhaps, to national-security concerns — a consequence 
of the urgency seizing the United States as it stared down the barrel of a 
fast-approaching global confrontation with Soviet Russia. Fluoride was 
critical to the U.S. economy and military defense, and industry's freedom to 
use it could not be seriously hampered during the cold war. Maybe it is 
because it happened in the late 1940s when the U.S. attention was really 
turned to other issues. During the Donora investigation the Soviets 
exploded Little Joe and the cold war got underway. Berlin was blockaded. 
A lot of big things in foreign policy were going on at that time, says Lynn 
Snyder. Or maybe this treatment was simply due to the fact that it affected 
a working-class community," she added. 

Scientist Kathleen Thiessen also gives a cold-war interpretation to the 
shunning of Philip Sadtler and the governments histrionic disavowal of 
fluoride as Donora s killer chemical. There certainly was a vested interest 
on the part of the government not to get the public upset about 
fluoride — after all if we are spewing out thousands of pounds a month or a 
day or whatever at Oak Ridge, and probably Portsmouth and Paducah [two 
other fluoride gaseous diffusion plants] and some other places, we don't 
want the public to get concerned. We don't want to suddenly say, "Hey, 
twenty people died because of a fluoride release last weekend.' This would 
not be good. We might get somebody upset. The aluminum industry of 
course was part of the cold war effort too." 

Philip Sadtler held a more basic view. Until his death he remained clear 
about what had happened at Donora and who was responsible for these 
events. It was murder, he said. I thought that the directors of U.S. Steel 
should have gone to jail for killing people. 



THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE INVESTIGATION 



Although the Donora disaster faded from public view, Federal Security 
administrator Oscar Ewing was soon back in the nations headlines. Nine 
months after his Public Health Service exonerated fluoride of the 
Halloween tragedy in western Pennsylvania, Ewing had a surprise 
announcement for the nation: the U.S. Public Health Service was reversing 
a long-held position. The ex-Alcoa lawyer declared that his agency now 
favored adding fluoride to drinking water supplies across the United States. 



11 



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