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.' 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).