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Donora, that technology was almost immediately superceded in newer plants by much cleaner technology, which used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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