Ch. 17. The Damage Is Done: the fluoride deception by Christopher Bryson from archive.org

The Damage Is Done 



BEHIND A CLUTTERED desk at the Newburgh Free Academy, under a 
portrait of Coretta Scott King, nurse -practitioner Audrey Carey daily 
performs physical exams on students at the large public school, which has 
2,500 children in grades ten through twelve. The former mayor is in a 
unique position to see some of the health effects from her community s 
long experiment of adding fluoride to water supplies. 

Fifty years earlier, Dr. Harold Hodge had assured local citizens that 
the Newburgh experiment had proved water fluoridation safe and had 
urged it upon the entire country. Health hazards do not justify postponing 
water fluoridation, he had told Congress in '95 4 1 The Hudson Valley 
town quickly became the poster child for a global sales effort. Newburgh s 
smiling youngsters were paraded before scientists from the United 
Kingdom, New Zealand, and the World Health Organization. 2 And, for six 
days in 1963 Dr. Hodge sang Newburgh s praises before the Supreme 
Court in Dublin, prescribing mandatory fluoridation for Ireland. 3 

Ireland, and several other countries, swallowed his story. But today, 
back in Newburgh, Audrey Carey is no longer certain. The most visible 
effects from fluoride in Newburgh water are not fewer cavities, but instead 
the high rates of speckled and mottled teeth. Careys friends and family, 
among many others in the community, have this condition, which is 
known as dental fluorosis. And after fifty years Newburgh children have 
virtually the same amount of dental decay as their counterparts in the 
neighboring town of Kingston, which was the control city in the original 
experiment. 



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Kingston has resisted all efforts in subsequent years to add fluoride to its 
water supply. But following Newburghs fluoridation, the rate of fluorosis 
was always higher there than in Kingston, and during the 1990s it rose 
again. Fluorosis also occurs more frequently in African American children, 
according to recent surveys done by the New York Department of Health.' 

I see the mottling that occurs, mainly in poor children, Carey told me. 
She also sees it in her own family: both her grandchildren have dental 
fluorosis. Although their mother is now very careful in reading the 
products she buys, to make sure that there is no fluo ride, Carey believes 
that the damage is done. Medically, it looks very bad for them," she says. 
"I am not sure what other physical effects they may have, or defects for that 
matter. 

Newburghs legacy of mottled teeth is shared by much of the rest of the 
country. Today, many dentists face a disturbing dilemma. Dental decay is 
still a serious and painful problem, especially in the inner city and even in 
fluoridated areas, where children are often trapped in a crossfire of poverty, 
poor nutrition, and a woeful public provision of dental care.' In some 
American cities as many as 3 out of every 4 children have dental fluorosis, 
and simply adding fluoride to public water supplies may have reached the 
end of the road as an easy proposal for fixing bad teeth.' The dental 
researcher Dr. Hardy Limeback, of the University of Toronto in Canada, is 
so concerned about the dangers of fluorosis that he claims fluoride 
toothpaste should be a prescription drug — at least until a child can spit, 
after the age of three. And even spitting is not foolproof; fluoride is 
absorbed directly into the body through the oral mucosa, notes Limeback. 
Poor nutrition can also raise the likelihood of dental fluorosis.' And if there 
is fluoride in the water supply, fluoride toothpaste may further increase 
the jeopardy. "Physicians have to get involved, Limeback insists. Before 
prescribing fluoride toothpaste, "you have to figure out, is this kid at risk 
for dental fluorosis? Better food, regular brushing and flossing, access to a 
dentist, and using nonfluoride toothpaste may be required. You can get 
perfectly healthy teeth with resistant enamel without having any kind of 
fluoride exposure, notes Limeback. (His son has dental fluorosis, and 
Limeback no longer keeps fluoride toothpaste in his home.) 



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Newburgh Mayor Careys concern that dental fluorosis may signal more 
serious health problems is also warranted. We are now bathed in fluoride 
from cradle to grave, from industrial, dental, and a multitude of other and 
sometimes unexpected sources.' But the health implications of such 
long-term fluoride ingestion remain woefully underexamined. Dental 
fluorosis is a bio-marker for systemic fluoride poisoning during early 
childhood, notes Dr. Limeback. Teeth are windows to the rest of the 
body, adds Paul Connett, a chemistry professor and antifluoride 
campaigner at St. Lawrence University in New York, who likens the 
symptomatic nature of dental fluoro-sis to the thin blue gum line that can 
indicate lead poisoning.' Yet when scientists peer behind the polished 
facade of row upon row of brilliantly shining teeth to explore whether 
fluoride may be injuring us in other ways, they often get a rude surprise. 

In 1992 Dr. Joseph Lyon of the University of Utah coauthored a study 
published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which found 
that water fluoridation was associated with an increased risk of hip 
fracture.' He was stunned at the lack of interest shown by U.S. 
public-health agencies in the study s results, and he has since found it 
difficult to get additional funding to further research this issue, he says. 
Today the United States has one of the highest rates of hip fracture in the 
world and is witnessing an epidemic of arthritis in 21 million Americans." 
Yet doctors are as likely to blame fluoride as flying saucers. My sense is 
there has been very little attention paid to toxicity, said Dr. Lyon. Almost 
on the grounds that it is an impossibility, and it is a waste of everybody s 
time and money to even think about it. (Subsequent studies have found 
similar associations between fluoride in water and bone fractures)." 

It is not just the elderly who are at risk. Fluoride may be weakening 
young peoples bones as well. In 2001 a study in Mexico reported that 
dental fluorosis was correlated with a higher incidence of bone fractures in 
children.' In the United States we now pay an annual half-billion-dollar 
hospital tab as a result of 775,000 childhood sports injuries. Although more 
young people are now playing sports — particularly girls, who have a high 
incidence of knee and ankle injuries — Dr. Lyon wonders whether the white, 
chalky blotches seen on teeth also predict the likelihood of a juvenile sports 
injury.' Is there some association [between childhood sporting 



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injury and] living in a fluoridated area? he asked. There would be a 
plausible physiologic basis for it. 

The assurances that drinking fluoride for a lifetime would be harmless 
flowed strongest from Dr. Hodge s cold war laboratory at the University of 
Rochester. In 1954 he had poured oil on the troubled waters of the growing 
citizens movement opposing fluoridation — telling Congress that it would 
require ingesting 20-8o milligrams of fluoride each day for ten to twenty 
years before injury would occur. After hearing Hodge, Congress rejected 
the appeals to ban water fluoridation (see chapter 11). 

In the late 198os, however, two antifluoride activists, Martha Bevis and 
Darlene Sherrell, questioned the data Hodge had given Congress. By then 
Hodges numbers had mutated further and were now being draped by 
fluoride promoters over all possible adverse chronic health effects. The 
American Dental Association (ADA) stated in a pamphlet that the daily 
intake required to produce symptoms of chronic toxicity after years of 
consumption is 20 to 8o milligrams or more depending on weight. 15 

It was a plain falsehood. Sherrell wrote to the National Academy of 
Sciences (NAS) asking where the numbers had come from. This dogged 
researcher spotted that even Hodge had changed his data. Hodge stated in 
1979 that io mgs of fluoride a day — not 20 — would cause crippling 
fluorosis.' Hodge had given no accompanying explanation for why he had 
halved his estimate. In any case, the government and the ADA ignored 
Hodge s correction; they continued to use his higher estimate of the amount 
of fluoride one could safely consume in a day, even though Hodge himself 
had repudiated it.' 

It was only with the help of Florida's Senator Bob Graham that Sherrell 
won a response in 1990 from the NAS, to whom she pointed out the error. 
The persistence of the citizen activist paid off. Three years later, in 1993 the 
NAS National Research Council (NRC) published yet another fluoride 
report, entitled Health Effects of Ingested Fluoride. This time, although there 
was no accounting or apologizing for the forty years of false reassurances, 
the numbers were quietly corrected. Crippling skeletal fluorosis, the NRC 
stated, might occur in people who have ingested 10-20 mg of fluoride per 
day for 10-20 years.' 



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It was an astonishing state of affairs. Two citizen activists, neither of 
them scientists, had torn away the flimsy garment that had concealed a 
half-century of scientific deception. The corrected 1993 NRC figures laid 
bare the facts: countless thousands of Americans have been exposed to 
dangerous levels of fluoride throughout their lives. In particular, the 
generation of baby boomers who have ingested a lifetime of fluoridated 
water and might more accurately be called Hodges Generation, may be 
suffering a variety of musculoskeletal and other health ailments that can be 
traced back to the toxicologist's false promise that fluoride in water was 
safe. 

The whole thing is bogus, explained the former EPA and U.S. Army 
scientist Dr. Robert J. Carton. In 1985 he got a close look at what he calls 
the dangerous joke at the heart of the government s fluoride policy and the 
very real likelihood that fluoride is injuring our bones. That year EPA 
scientists, including Carton, were asked to set a new and higher national 
level for the publics permissible exposure to fluoride in drinking water. 
Until the EPA review Carton had not been aware the subject was 
controversial. I was just like everybody else, said Carton, it was a 
no-brainer — fluoride is completely safe and effective, all that kind of stuff. 

Under Reagan-appointee administrator William Ruckelshaus, EPA 
senior management had proposed raising the safe permissible level of 
fluoride in drinking water from 2.3 mg to 4 mg. They had a simple way of 
justifying this. The blotchy teeth — dental fluorosisproduced by as little 
as 1 mg of fluoride per liter, which worsened greatly and grew more brittle 
at 4 mg per liter, were deemed a harm-less "cosmetic" side effect. And 
despite the voluble protests of Car-ton, fellow EPA scientist Dr. William 
Hirzy, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the EPA's employee 
union — Local 2050 of the National Federation of Federal 
Employees — the new national standard was approved. 

The EPA got away with it, says Carton — but only at the price of 
embarrassing its staff as professional scientists and jeopardizing the 
nations health. As Carton explains it, even according to the EPA's own 
figures, 3 percent of the population drink more than five liters of water a 
day. If that water contains 4 mg of fluoride — the supposedly safe new 
standard — then those thirsty people will cross the threshold at which even 
the EPA admitted severe health effects 



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were likely to occur. You basically have a standard that, based on their 
own information, shows it is going to cause crippling skeletal fluorosis, 
says Carton. Of course, the 1993 revised estimate by the National Academy 
of Science for how much fluoride can cause crippling skeletal fluorosis is 
not 20 mg, but 10 mg. That means that the EPA standard is way off and 
would permit crippling bone injuries in a very great many people. They are 
really causing problems, Carton said. 

Moreover, the crippling fluorosis estimate specifies a limited time 
period of ten to twenty years for crippling fluorosis to appear. But fluoride 
is a poison that accumulates in the body over a lifetime. What happens 
when you get 10 mg a day for forty or sixty or even eighty years? In that 
case, you still reach the levels that cause crippling skeletal fluorosis, but at 
a later age. This simple consideration was not even addressed in the EPAs 
new exposure standard, says Carton, now retired. None of it makes sense. 
All you have to do is look at it for ten seconds and it falls apart, he 
concludes. 

Bone defects possibly linked to fluoride had been noticed at New 
-burgh back in 1955, after just ten years of water fluoridation. A radiologist, 
Dr. John Caffey of Columbia University, called the defects striking in 
their similarity to bone cancer. They were detected on X-rays and seen 
more than twice as frequently among boys in Newburgh as among boys in 
nonfluoridated Kingston. Caffe ys cancer suspicions, however, were not 
discussed in the 1956 Newburgh Final Report. In 1977 a National 
Academy of Sciences panel took a second look at Dr. Caffey's report, 
which had been published in 1955. The Newburgh cancer clue had "never 
been followed up," the experts said. "It would be important to have direct 
evidence that osteogenic sarcoma [bone cancer] rates in males under 30 
have not increased with fluoridation," the panel stated' 

Also in 1977 Congress discovered that despite a quarter-century of 
endorsing water fluoridation, federal health authorities had never 
cancer-tested fluoride. When cancer tests were finally performed twelve 
years later, it was found that fluoride caused excess bone cancers in young 
male rats. The government concluded that the results showed equivocal 
evidence that fluoride was a carcinogen." In truth, fluorides link to cancer 
may have been much stronger than authorities conceded. The 
above-mentioned tests also 



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showed increased liver cancers in rats, but both the bone and liver cancer 
evidence was systematically downgraded, according to Dr. William 
Marcus, chief scientist at the EPAs Division of Water Quality." After Dr. 
Marcus aired those allegations in an interview on ABC News, he was fired 
(for supposedly unrelated reasons). But a federal judge later ruled that 
Marcus had been terminated because he had publicly questioned and 
opposed EPAs fluoride policy. The toxicologist was reinstated, and the 
government was ordered to pay damages. 24 Since then additional 
epidemiological studies have found more cancer in fluoridated areas, 
especially bone cancer in young men. 25 

Even the verdict of "equivocal" carcinogen is disturbing. Maybe 
fluoride doesn't cause cancer, but maybe it does. Is it worth 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. 26 

Harold Hodge had also reassured American families about fluoride 
while secretly worrying about the chemical s effects on the central nervous 
system of nuclear workers. Today central-nervous-system illnesses shadow 
our young and old alike, with an epidemic of attention deficit and 
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children, and with 4.5 million elderly 
citizens who are diagnosed with Alzheimer s dementia. The increase in 
Alzheimer s in the United States is largely attributed to the aging of the 
population, but "environmental" causes are also blamed. Does fluoride 
play a role in causing the disease? Quite possibly: In 1992 the American 
scientists Robert Isaacson, Julie Varner, and Karl Jensen found that 
fluoridated water carried aluminum into rat brains, producing 
Alzheimer's-like changes in brain tissue. 27 Phyllis Mullenix, who gave 
laboratory mice moderate doses of fluoride and generated symptoms 
resembling ADHD, fears that the high incidence of both diseases in the 
general population is direct evidence of fluorides toxic effects and that 
both the number and kind of such injuries may worsen in the coming years. 

I think we are going to see a lot more neurological problems that 
currently have no answers, Mullenix said. Extremes of behavioral 
problems are going to start showing up. There will be more children 



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and people with unexplained convulsions, more unexplained cases of 
Alzheimer s and that kind of thing. 

There were other data on Newburgh s health that warranted concern. In 
the 1956 Newburgh Final Report, researchers noted that young women in 
Newburgh reached puberty at an earlier age than did girls in nonfluoridated 
Kingston. Laboratory experiments have recently reproduced similar 
fluoride effects in gerbils.' In other words, fluoride has the ability to impact 
the female reproductive system and may be lowering the age at which 
women are reaching puberty. And following the introduction of fluoride 
into city waters, Newburgh's heart-disease rate was found by researchers to 
be one of the highest in the United States, another fact missing from the 
official Final Report. 29 Heart disease also doubled just five years into the 
nation's other early fluoridation experiment, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 
Fluoride concentrates in the arteries, attracting calcium, and can contribute 
directly to their hardening, according to scientists. 30 The folly of adding 
fluoride to water supplies in a nation so burdened by heart disease would 
seem obvious. 

Mayor Carey now sees the 1945 "demonstration project in her 
hometown in a very different light. "The more I read and the more I listen, 
the more I understand that we were subjected to experimentation," Carey 
stated. The newly uncovered Manhattan Project documents about 
Newburgh suggest to Carey that her townspeople were not told the truth 
about the 1945 fluoride experiment. What happened to all of the samples 
that they took from me as a child?" she asked. Where did they end up? 
What were they taken for? Certainly it wasnt for preventative health care. 

Today some dentists are shocked to learn that a classic bait and switch 
was pulled on the public and on health professionals alike regarding the 
chemicals used in fluoridation. Pure sodium fluoride was used for the early 
Newburgh and Grand Rapids experiments, but today 90 percent of 
fluoridated public water supplies in the United States use not 
pharmaceutical-grade fluoride but industrial-grade silicofluoride 
"scrubbed" from the smokestacks of the Florida phosphate industry.' 
Important long-term toxicity tests have never been performed on these 
silicofluorides, although some studies have associated the chemical with 
higher levels of blood lead in children who live where they are used for 
fluoridation. Silicofluorides also 



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frequently contain arsenic at levels that may present a risk of cancer, 
according to data from the National Academy of Sciences.' "You are 
sticking this poison into the water supply supposedly to prevent dental 
disease. It is not even doing that — and you are causing cancer just from 
the arsenic alone. This is totally criminal," argued the University of 
Toronto s Dr. Limeback. 

Even the Paley Commissions long-ago predictions that these 
silicofluorides produced by the Florida phosphate industry would become 
an important and valuable source of industrial fluoride have not come to 
pass (see chapter 11). Today most industrial fluoride used in the United 
States is the raw mineral fluospar, now mined and imported from China. 33 
For now, absent trouble with the Chinese and with a low price of fluorspar 
on world markets, silicofluoride waste from the Florida phosphate 
production is not used as an industrial raw material; rather, it is collected, 
billed to the taxpayer, and dumped into public water supplies around the 
country — all under the guise of protecting children s teeth." Whether a 
dentifrice, pollution-control measure, or cold war national security blanket, 
EPA chemist Dr. William Hirzy put the loony logic of such dumping of 
industrial silicofluorides this way: If this stuff gets out into the air, its a 
pollutant; if it gets into the river, its a pollutant; if it gets into the lake, its a 
pollutant; but if it goes right straight into your drinking water system, its 
not a pollutant. Thats amazing! 

While much of the medical profession in the United States remains 
ignorant about fluorides potential for harm, there are exceptions. 
Since 1968, scientists at the International Society for Fluoride 
Research (ISFR) have catalogued fluorides impact on human health 
and the environment. In scores of peer-reviewed papers, their journal 
Fluoride has linked the chemical to multiple human-health effects, 
including thyroid problems, Downs Syndrome, arthrititis, 
central-nervous-system effects, cardiovascular problems, and 
breathing difficulties." 

George Waldbott — who founded ISFR — believed that fluoride's 
ability to wreak such biological havoc was a function of its basic 
nature. Although the exact mechanism of action was then unknown, 
Waldbott speculated that fluoride buried deep into different organ 
systems and then disrupted the numerous chemical systems (such as 
enzymes) that regulate life. 



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Waldbott may have been right. Enzymes are spectacularly sensitive to 
fluoride. In files that were only declassified in the mid-1990s it was 
revealed that in 1944 Harold Hodge's bomb-program 
researchers at the University of Rochester had experimented with hog liver 
enzymes to measure fluoride pollution in bomb factories. Fluoride was so 
much more toxic to the esterase enzyme than uranium that contamination 
by fluoride and uranium could easily be differentiated. And twenty years 
after George Wald-boa's death scientists may be on the brink of unlocking 
a crucial cellular mechanism for how fluoride acts on our bodies. That 
detective story has a disturbing twist. The aluminum industry has spilled a 
great deal of fluoride into the environment in the last century and has been 
closely associated with efforts to promote water fluoridation. Ironically, it 
may be that aluminum combined with fluoride is especially responsible for 
fluoride s toll on health and the environment. 

In 1994 the American scientists Alfred G. Gilman and Martin Rodbell 
won the Nobel Prize for discovering the importance of G-proteins in 
biology. The protein molecules act as biological amplifiers or relay stations, 
converting information received at a cells surface and producing changes 
inside that cell. For example, when we are angry, the adrenal gland 
produces the adrenaline hormone. When the hormone reaches the liver or 
the heart, the G-protein is activated, telling the organ to produce extra 
energy. The bad news is that G-proteins are easily fooled by aluminum and 
fluoride, which gang up violently and at a molecular level on our bodies, 
double-teaming for extra effect, according to the Czech scientist Anna 
Strunecka, a researcher at King Charles University in Prague. In an abstract 
titled Fluoride and Aluminum: Messengers of False Information, 
Strunecka reports: It appears probable that we will not find any 
physiological process which is not potentially influenced by 
[alumino-fluorides]. 37 She added, The synergistic action of fluoride and 
aluminum in the environment, water and food can thus evoke multiple 
pathological symptoms. 

The dangers of pumping fluoride and aluminum into our environment, 
and our duties to future generations are clear, according to the scientist. An 
awareness of the health risks of this new eco-toxicological phenomena ... 
would undoubtedly contribute 



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significantly to reducing the risk of a decrease in intelligence of 
adults and children, and many other disorders of the twenty-first 
century, noted Strunecka. 

The Strange Case of the Missing Debaters 

THE POTENTIAL NUMBER of fluoride-linked health issues may be 
enormous." But the willingness of scientists to confront them is not. 
Fifty years of state propaganda have left too many scars and phobias. 
In the spring of 2001 scientist Tom Webster attempted to organize a 
debate about water fluoridation — and was unable to find anyone 
willing to speak in defense of the chemical. The Boston University 
environmental health professor had first grown curious about fluoride 
in the early 1990s, when his scientist friend Paul Con -nett had 
confided that he was worried about the potential negative health 
effects from small doses of fluoride to which Americans are regularly 
exposed. 

At first Webster himself had been dismissive about the issue of 
fluoride. My knee-jerk reaction was, "Oh man, what are you getting 
involved in that stuff for? They are all nuts, - he said. But then I 
stopped myself, and I said, Well, you know, I actually dont know 
anything about this. All I could remember was the Dr. Strangelove 
image and the John Birch Society. Their two big issues were get the 
U.S. out of the UN and stop water fluoridation. The more I thought 
about it, the more I thought, Here I am in the public health profession, 
I teach about this stuff, and I don't know anything about fluoride," he 
remembers. "It turns out there is a huge literature on this which I 
would never have guessed a couple of years ago. 

The professor was baffled. He did not know what to make of the 
gulf between the nice things the government said about fluoride and 
the worries of scientists such as Paul Connett. 39 He was especially 
perturbed by a study he read by a Dr. Phyllis Mullenix showing 
central-nervous-system effects in rats. "Is this bad?" he said. "My gut 
reaction was that I dont really like the sound of this. 

So Webster scheduled the fluoridation debate. He had joined a new 
group called the Association for Science in the Public Interest (ASIPI). 
The members were all professional scientists who had grown 
concerned that research was too often disconnected from 



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the public interest. Now, as he scrambled to organize a debate at the groups 
first national conference in May 2001, Webster was scratching his head. 
Phone call after phone call, letter after letter, he got the same banged-door 
rejection from profluoridationists. He felt that many of their dismissals had 
a mechanical, Stepford-wife similarity that almost sounded as if they were 
reading from a common script. Several respondents had even been quite 
rude. I got a couple of really obnoxious replies like, How dare you even 
hold such an event, it is really unprofessional. One of those was from a guy 
at the CDC — one of the big fluoridation guys," said Webster. " It reminded 
me of the kind of stuff that you read about: "Advice to dentists on why they 
should never debate antifluoridationists.' It was that kind of thing." 

There were even whispers from his own group. A generation gap 
divided scientists, he realized. "One or two people inside the organization 
said, We really shouldnt have a thing on fluoride, it will give us a bad 
image,'" said Webster. While the younger researchers were willing to host 
the fluoride debate, Webster found that older members were gun shy as a 
result of the painful experiences many scientists and health professionals 
had undergone in the 19505 and 196os. It is our older colleagues who 
remember that stuff and how bad it was, and say This is just poison for 
your career, said Webster. This is an old battle from the '50s. " 

Even liberals in his organization shied from hosting the 2001 debate. It 
wasnt about science, it was about the politics, Webster said. Activist 
scientists already have a hard enough time in this world. Industry is trying 
to kill us and it is hard to survive in aca-demia. This is like, why push beans 
up your nose? 

The May 2001 debate in Virginia finally took place and was well 
attended, despite the lack of any profluoridation speakers, said Webster. 
His friend Paul Connett spoke. Most people did not know that there was an 
issue — fluoride is just not on the radar screen. If people like Connett are 
crazy, I would have loved to see the CDC people come and squash em like 
a bug. There seems to be almost a taboo about discussing this subject, and 
that really doesnt seem right in public health. 

Tom Webster is not alone in his frustration. That same year, in the fall of 
2001, a second scientists organization, the American Col- 



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lege of Toxicology, hosted a Great Debate on water fluoridation at its 
annual Washington, DC, conference. Phyllis Mullenix was a speaker. 
Again, no one from the profluoride side would speak. The president of 
the organization, Robert E. Osterberg, had given the debate organizer 
many names and telephone numbers of scientists at leading drug 
companies; he was astonished that none of them showed up. I find it 
extremely difficult to believe, said Dr. Oster-berg, that companies 
that make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by putting fluoride 
into kids multiple vitamins wouldnt stand up there and justify why 
they are doing it, and answer any concerns that people may have. 



Epilogue 



Blind to the Truth?