Ch. 11. As Vital to Our National Life As a Spark Plug to a Motor Car: the fluoride deception by Christopher Bryson from archive.org

Ch. 11. As Vital to Our National Life As a Spark Plug to a Motor Car: the fluoride deception by Christopher Bryson from archive.org

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



THE RAW MILITARY power that won World War II flowed directly, as 
molten metal, from blast furnaces and aluminum pot lines and from the 
American mastery of the atomic bomb. Fluoride was at the chemical core 
of all these operations. While the American public was told that fluoride 
was safe and good for children s teeth, U.S. strategic planners stockpiled 
fluoride during the cold war for a feared global war with the Communists.' 

Fluoride was declared a "strategic and critical" material by the 
government after World War II. In 1950, as the Korean war erupted, 
President Truman asked the head of CBS television, William S. Paley, to 
chair a task force to study the United States' mineral reserves — and its 
vulnerabilities to having imports cut off in wartime.' 

Fluoride was the lifeblood of the modern industrial economy, the Paley 
Commission reported. "[Fluoride] ... is an essential component of 
enormously vital industries whose dollar value is measured in billions and 
upon which the whole national industrial structure increasingly depends, 
wrote one Paley analyst in a document marked RESTRICTED. Without 
this little known mineral, the document continued, "such industrial giants 
as aluminum, steel, and chemicals would be most severely affected. Little 
or no aluminum could be produced; steel production would be reduced 
substantially; the output and quality of important chemical products such 
as refrigerants, propellants for insecticides, and plastics would be 
significantly cut down. ' 



AS VITAL TO OUR NATIONAL LIFE . 



Fluoride was as vital to our national life as a spark plug to a motor car, 
announced C. O. Anderson, the vice president of the nations largest 
fluorspar producer, Ozark Mahoning. (Fluorspar is the mineral ore from 
which most industrial fluoride is produced). Your car doesnt run if the 
spark plug is in the control of any foreign country, Anderson warned the 
Paley Commission. Fluorides importance would only grow, predicted 
Miles Haman, Manager of the Crystal Fluorspar Company in Illinois. 
General expansion of industrial facilities and building up of war machines 
all over the world [would necessitate] using much aluminum and steel and 
consequently more fluorspar.' 

There was bad news, Paley's team heard. Fluoride stockpiles had fallen 
below danger point levels and domestic supplies were growing short. 
The U.S. is vulnerable security-wise were a hot war suddenly to develop, 
stated Paley analyst Donor M. Lion.' While 369,000 tons of fluorspar had 
been consumed by industry in the United States in 1950, a million tons 
would be needed by 1975, the team projected. If the United States were 
compelled to rely on natural fluorspar alone, serious obstacles to growth 
and security would emerge, the group reported. 

But a magic bullet promised to ensure a continued strong national 
defense, planners heard. Short on fluorspar reserves, the United States was 
blessed with one of the worlds largest supplies of natural phosphate, a raw 
mineral that lay in huge geological deposits in Florida. The mineral was the 
feedstock for the production of superphosphate fertilizer. It contained 
significant quantities of fluoride — 3 or 4 percent — and traces of numerous 
other chemicals, including uranium.' America was sitting on its own 
virtually inexhaustible supply of fluoride. Could the phosphate industry 
supply fluoride for the nation, the government asked? 

Sure — if the price was right, answered Paul Manning, a vice president of 
the phosphate -producing International Minerals and Chemical Corporation. 
If the fluoride that was then being belched as pollution into the 
orange-perfumed Florida air — some nineteen tons in 1957 alone — could 
only fetch a better price on the market, then the phosphate industry might 
just be willing to trap some of their waste as silicofluoride! The difficulty 
with this, Manning told the Commission, is that sodium silico fluoride is a 
drug on 



150 



CHAPTER ELEVEN 



the market, and the price which can be obtained for it is not attrac tive 
enough to result in its production. ' 

The Florida phosphate producers could supply fluoride, explained 
Manning, but they had little current incentive. Despite a hornets nest of 
lawsuits from farmers and angry local citizens gassed by fluoride fumes, it 
appeared cheaper for industry to fight the lawsuits and concomitant efforts 
to regulate pollution than to trap the toxic emissions.' "At the present time 
we have no idea as to the point to which prices would have to rise to justify 
the current recovery techniques," Manning told the Commission. 

The dilemma was clear. The government wanted the Florida fluoride in 
case of wartime emergency — but the state's phosphate producers needed a 
carrot before capturing their toxic waste. "The phosphate industry is 
primarily interested in super-phosphate, and fluorine recovery is a very 
minor matter. This is the kind of potential shortage that could develop into 
a full-blown crisis before a move is made to avert it, warned one Paley 
analyst." 

An elegant solution existed, of course. Using the phosphate industry's 
waste to fluoridate public water supplies meant that the fertilizer producers 
would now pay far less, if anything, to dispose of their most troublesome 
toxic waste. They would be guaranteed a source of taxpayer revenue for 
installing pollution-control devices; and U.S. strategic planners would win 
a nearly inexhaustible potential supply of domestic fluoride. There was yet 
another potential cold-war reason for disposing of fluosilicic acid in public 
water supplies. The Florida phosphate beds were also an important source 
of uranium, harvested for the Atomic Energy Commission. Because 
uranium is only a trace mineral in the phosphate deposits, enormous 
quantities had to be processed to glean worthwhile amounts of uranium, so 
much waste fluoride was also produced. Permitting that fluoride to be 
dumped in public water supplies — rather than being disposed of as toxic 
waste — reduced the cost of such uranium extraction and provided a supply 
of fluoride. 12 

In 1983 the EPA's Rebecca Hamner acknowledged that fluoridating 
water with phosphate -industry waste was a fix for Florida's environmental 
pollution. "This Agency regards such use as an ideal environmental 
solution to a long standing problem, the Deputy Assistant Administrator 
for Water wrote. "By recovering by-product 



AS VITAL TO OUR NATIONAL LIFE . 



151 



fluosilicic acid from fertilizer manufacturing, water and air pollution 
are minimized, and water utilities have a low-cost source of fluoride 
available to them, she added. 13 

DID COLD-WAR PLANNERS also encourage water fluoridation to 
guarantee an alternative supply of fluoride for war industries or to 
reduce the cost of disposing of fluoride waste generated by uranium 
production? On June I, 1950, as communist troops prepared for an 
invasion of South Korea, the Public Health Service abruptly reversed 
its opposition and declared that it now favored adding fluoride to 
water supplies. 14 The PHS now smiled upon fluoride, announced 
Oscar Ewing, whose Federal Security Agency was in charge of the 
PHS. He attributed this change of opinion to results from the water 
fluoridation experiment in Newburgh, New York, which showed a 65 
percent reduction in dental cavities in local children. 15 

But the origins of the Newburgh study, as we saw in chapter 6, were 
manifestly suspicious. And irrespective of the dental data ( which have 
been seriously questioned 16 ), the Newburgh fluorida-tion experiment 
was a safety trial — designed to last for ten years to research potential 
side effects of drinking fluoridated water. When Ewing announced the 
government's about-face in 1950, the safety study was only half 
complete. 

Ewing was well placed to act on ulterior national security concerns 
or on behalf of industry. His Federal Security Agency was one of the 
most powerful cold- war government bureaus. He had been Alcoa s 
legal liaison to Washington during World War II, shaping the massive 
expansion of the nation's aluminum industry. And the former Wall 
Street lawyer was a member of an inner circle of Truman confidants 
known as the Wardman Park group, who ate each Monday night at 
Ewing's Washington apartment and whose cigar-smoking, 
steak-dining members included Clark Clifford, who was famously 
close to the Pentagon and the CIA." 

"No Injury Would Occur" — 
Harold Hodge Turns the Tide 

WATER-FLUORIDATION ADVOCATES greeted the government flip-flop 
with rapture. Two Wisconsin dentists were especially elated. 



152 



CHAPTER ELEVEN 



Dr. John Frisch and Dr. Frank Bull, the state dental officer, had been 
among the nations earliest profluoridation activists, lobbying federal 
officials with an enthusiasm that bordered on the perverse. In 1944 Dr. 
Frisch began giving his seven-year-old daughter Marylin water from a jug 
hed prepared with 1.5 ppm fluoride. (That same year the Journal of the 
American Dental Association had editorialized, Our knowledge of the 
subject certainly does not warrant the introduction of fluorine in 
community water supplies. ) Frisch placed "Poison" labels on the 
unfluoridated kitchen faucets, to remind Marylin to drink his potion 
instead. 

Three years later the fathers passion was rewarded, according to 
historian Donald McNeil as related in his 1957 book, The Fight for 
Fluoridation. Sitting in a Madison restaurant, Dr. Frisch noticed a "flash" 
on his daughter's teeth. "He could hardly believe his eyes," McNeil wrote. 
It looked like a case of mottling. He rushed her out -side in the bright 
sunlight and thought he noticed it again. Next day he excitedly asked 
Frank Bull over to get his opinion. Bull con curred.... It was mottling. 
(Remember, fluorosis does nothing to strengthen a tooth, may in fact 
weaken it, and is a visible indicator of systemic fluoride poisoning during 
the period that the teeth were being formed. No matter how mild the 
mottling, it is an external sign of internal distress, according to the 
scientist H. V. Smith, one of the researchers who in the 1930s discovered 
that fluoride was mottling teeth.)' 

Now, as the PHS endorsed water fluoridation for the rest of the 

United States, a similar thrill ran through the Wisconsin dentists. 

"Cease firing!" wrote Frisch. "The hard fight is over," added Frank 

Bull. 19 

But the fight was just beginning. Almost immediately citizens began to 
learn some disturbing information. The world's leading fluoride authority, 
Kaj Roholm, had opposed giving fluoride to children. The AMA and the 
ADA had all editorialized against fluoridation as recently as the early 
1940s. And leading scientists, such as M. C. and H. V. Smith, also worried 
about adding fluoride to water supplies. Although mottled teeth are 
somewhat more resistant to the onset of decay, they are structurally weak; 
when the decay does set in the result is often disastrous, the 
husband-and-wife team reported. 



AS VITAL TO OUR NATIONAL LIFE . 



The Smiths sounded an obvious warning. "If intake of fluoride 
( through drinking water) can harm the delicate enamel to such an 
extent that it fails to enamelize the unborn teeth in children, is there 
any reason to believe that the destructive progress of fluoride ends 
right there? The range between toxic and non-toxic levels of fluoride 
ingestion is very small, Drs. Smith added. Any procedure for 
increasing fluorine consumption to the so-called upper limits of 
toxicity would be hazardous. 21 

Fluoride was put to the vote for the first time on September 19, 
1950. It was a gloriously unruly and democratic spectacle. The Wis 
consin town of Steven s Point had been fluoridating its water for five 
months, but local activists — including a poet, a railroad repair -man, 
and a local businessman — forced the town council to put the issue to 
the ballot. After a colorful debate in the pages of the local newspapers, 
and rallies with activists caroling Good-bye, Fluorine to the tune of 
Good Night, Irene, fluoridation was defeated in Steven s Point by a 
vote of 3,705 to 2,166. 

A wildfire of citizen protest now flashed across the United States. 
The antifluoride camp found one of their most distinguished voices in 
a Michigan doctor, George L. Waldbott. The German-born physician 
was a medical pioneer and allergy specialist who had carried out the 
first ever pollen survey in Michigan in 1927 and the first national 
fungus survey in 1937. 22 In 1933 he reported on sudden deaths from 
local and general anesthetics, and was the first scientist to report on 
similar fatal allergic reactions to penicillin, drawing the attention of 
Time magazine. He had written a book on skin allergies called Contact 
Dermatitis, and in 1953 he published the first medical report on the 
emphysema caused by smoking 
cigarettes. 23 

Waldbott now turned his attention to fluoride. In the spring of 1953, 
Waldbott's wife, Edith, pointed him to recent medical criticism of 
water fluoridation at a February 1952 Congressional hearing on the 
use of chemicals in food. Waldbott, the vice president of the 
American College of Allergists, began his own investigations and 
soon found that fluoride was no different from many other drugs and 
chemicals: some people were uniquely sensitive and suffered acute, 
painful, and debilitating allergy to small amounts of additional 
fluoride in their water. 



1 54 



CHAPTER ELEVEN 



Again and again Waldbott came across patients in his own practice who, 
when they ceased intake of their fluoridated water supply, were relieved of 
symptoms ranging from stiffness and pain in the spine to muscle weakness 
from stomach upsets to visual disturbances and headaches. His first report 
of such a patient appeared in medical literature in 1955, and by 1958 he had 
come across many more cases.' In these patients, ranging from an 
eight-year-old girl to a sixty-two-year-old woman, he ran scientific "double 
blind" tests in which the patients were given water without knowing 
whether it was fluoridated or not. The symptoms recurred only if they were 
given fluoridated water, the scientist reported." 

Waldbott was not the only doctor to spot that some people were 
especially sensitive to fluoride. A former University of Rochester 
researcher, Dr. Reuben Feltman, who was working on a PHS grant at the 
Passaic General Hospital in New Jersey, also reported that fluoride 
supplements given to pregnant women caused eczema, neurological 
problems, and stomach and bowel upsets." 

Medical professionals saw that it was impossible to control how much 
fluoride somebody ingested. Athletes and other active individuals, or 
people in hot climates, diabetics, or the kidney-injured drink more and 
therefore consume more fluoride. There are varying amounts of fluoride in 
food, while hundreds of thousands of workers are exposed to fluorides in 
their jobs." There seemed to be little or no margin of safety between the 
amount of fluoride that was associated with fewer cavities and the amount 
that would cause injury. Unfortunately the line between mottling and no 
mottling is an elusive one and the degree of control to be exercised seems 
to be very fine, concluded Dr. George Rapp, professor of biochemistry and 
physiology of Loyola University School of Dentistry." (Even at the level of 
1 part per million, at which the optimal cavity-fighting effect was 
reported, dental mottling was seen in a portion of the population, according 
to the PHS expert H. Trendley Dean.'") 

Fluoride promoters had a simple solution. Mottled teeth were described 
as a "cosmetic" issue, not a health problem. Most importantly, promoters 
vigorously denied that any injury to bones or organs could ever be 
produced from drinking water fluoridated at 1 part per million. 



AS VITAL. TO OUR NATIONAL LIFE. 



155 



To make that safety argument, the government turned to a familiar 
face, Dr. Harold Hodge from the University of Rochester. In two key 
papers for the National Research Council (NRC) and the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), pub lished in 
1953 and 1954 respectively, Hodge maintained that Present 
knowledge fails to indicate any health hazard associated with the extra 
deposition of fluoride in the skeleton that will undoubtedly accompany 
water fluoridation. 

For a generation, these papers would be a primary source for the 
reassurances given to Congress and to millions of citizens in the 
United States and around the world of the safety of water fluo-ridation. 
The small print at the end stated that they were based on work 
performed under contract with the U. S. Atomic Energy Project, 
Rochester, New York. 

Hodges assurances were profoundly helpful to industry and the 
nations fledgling nuclear program. The large doses he found to be 
safe for the public and for nuclear workers became for several gen- 
erations of establishment health officials the medical template for 
discussing the dangers of fluoride exposure, and laid a medicolegal 
foundation for the courtroom defense that worker sickness could not 
possibly be due to fluoride? 

Hodge also wielded his safety assurances in Congress to cut down 
the citizen protest against water fluoridation that was springing up 
across the country. By the mid-1950s, unimpressed by the Public 
Health Service endorsement — and connected by George and Edith 
Waldbotts bimonthly newspaper called National Fluoridation News, 
which contained reviews on the latest medical information, updates of 
antifluoride referenda around the country, and cartoons by New 
Yorker contributor Robert Day — an unruly alliance of doctors, 
dentists, scientists, and community groups were successfully turning 
back fluoridation at the ballot box. Seattle had experienced a 
tumultuous debate in 1952, voting almost 2 to 1 in a referendum 
against fluoride. The following year Cincinnati voters also said no. By 
the mid-1950s the tide of public opinion appeared to be moving 
against fluoride, according to the historian Donald McNeil. 

"[By December 1955] The U.S. Public Health Service reported that 
of 231 communities voting on fluoridation 127 had rejected it, 
McNeil wrote. Adverse referenda votes in twenty-eight communities 



156 



CHAPTER ELEVEN 



had discontinued established projects. Six months later the proponents had 
won eight more elections campaigns, the anti-fluorida-tion forces 
forty-five, he added." 

In 1954 national legislation banning fluoridation was proposed in 
Congress by Rep. Roy Wier of Minnesota. The suggested law, HR 2341, 
was titled A Bill to Protect the Public Health from the Dangers of 
Fluoridation of Water. It forbade any federal state or local authority from 
adding fluoride to water supplies. Hearings were held at the end of May in 
Room 1334 of the New House Office Building, with a great array of 
medical figures testifying against and in favor of the bill. 31 

George Waldbott led the opposition. Symptoms of chronic low-level 
fluoride poisoning, such as nausea, general malaise, joint pains, decreased 
blood clotting, anemia were vague and insidious testified Waldbott, and 
could therefore easily be blamed on something other than fluoride — which 
made a correct diagnosis difficult, particularly for doctors who knew little 
about fluoride s toxic potential. Waldbott repeated his arguments that as a 
result of the danger of allergic reaction, the varying amounts of water drunk 
by different people, the risk to kidney patients or diabetics, and the extra 
fluoride consumed in food, there can be no such thing as a safe 
concentration. Neither the benefit nor the safety of fluorida-tion water 
supplies are sufficiently proven to warrant experimenta tion with human 
life, Waldbott told Congress. 

But once again Harold Hodge stepped into the breach, saving the day for 
the government. He blunderbussed fluoride opponents with his National 
Academy of Sciences-approved data. The Rochester scientist was the 
nation's leading fluoride authority, a member of the Mellon Institutes 
Industrial Hygiene Association, chairman of the prestigious National 
Academy of Sciences Committee on Toxicology — and, of course, the 
former chief toxicologist of the Manhattan Project. It would take a massive 
dose of fluoride, Hodge testified — between 20 and 8o milligrams 
consumed daily for to to 20 years — to produce injury. Waldbott was 
mistaken, water fluoridation was harmless, Hodge insisted. Even if all 
the fluoride ingested in the drinking water (1 part per million) in a lifetime 
were stored in the skeleton, Hodge told Congress, no injury would occur.' 

Hodge s sober assurances provided the coup de grace for the 



AS VITAL TO OUR NATIONAL LIFE 



157 



legislation. The proposed law banning fluoridation expired in committee 
and never made it to the floor of the Congress for a full vote. And Hodges 
safety data were repeated for a generation, mantralike, in countless 
speeches, official documents, pamphlets, magazine articles, and textbooks. 
They were widely used by the American Dental Association and the World 
Health Organization. As recently as 1997 these same numbers were cited by 
the federal Institute of Medicine. 3 " 

And no one noticed when, in an obscure paper published in y79, after all 
the tumult and shouting had died down, Hodge quietly admitted that his 
safety figures had been wrong (see chapter 17). 



12