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.' https://www.blogger.com/null 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). 
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