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. https://www.blogger.com/null 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superceded in newer plants by much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 134 CHAPTER TEN 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.' THE
PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE INVESTIGATION 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
136 CHAPTER
TEN 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- THE PUBLIC HEALTH
SERVICE INVESTIGATION
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. 138 CHAPTER TEN 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 140 CHAPTER TEN 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
THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE INVESTIGATION 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,
142
CHAPTER TEN
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 1 44 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 146 CHAPTER TEN 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
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