.
Fluoride:
Industry's Toxic Coup
For nearly 50
years, the US government and media have been telling the public that fluoride
compounds (generally referred to simply as "fluoride") are safe and
beneficial chemicals that reduce cavities - especially in children.
Manufacturers add
it to toothpaste, municipalities put it in the public's drinking water. But
fluoride has another side that the government never mentions. It is a toxic
industrial pollutant.
For decades, US
industry has rained heavy doses of waste fluoride on people. By the
Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) last estimate, at least 155,000 tons a
year are released into the air by US industrial plants. Emissions into lakes,
rivers and oceans have been estimated to be as high as 500,000 tons a year.
While people living
near or working in heavy fluoride-emitting industrial plants receive the highest
doses, the general population has not been spared. Because fluoride compounds
are not biodegradable, they gradually accumulate in the environment, in the food
chain, and in people's bones and teeth.
If this general
increase in fluoride dose were proved harmful to humans, the impact on industry
would be major. The nation's air is contaminated by fluoride emissions from the
production of iron, steel, aluminium, copper, lead and zinc; phosphates
(essential for the manufacture of all agricultural fertilizers); plastics;
gasoline; brick, cement, glass, ceramics, and the multitudinous other products
made from clay; coal-burning electrical power-plants; and uranium processing.
As for water, the
leading industrial fluoride polluters are the producers and processors of glass,
pesticides and fertilizers, steel and aluminium, chemicals and metals - copper
and brass, titanium, superalloys, and refractory metals for military use.
Industry and government
have long had a powerful motive for claiming that fluoride is safe. But
maintaining this position has not been easy since fluoride is one of the most
toxic substances known. "Airborne fluorides," reports the US
Department of Agriculture, "have caused more worldwide damage to domestic
animals than any other air pollutant." Evidence that industrial fluoride
has been killing and crippling human beings has existed at least since the
1930s.
Primal Poison
Of the highly toxic
elements that are naturally present throughout the earth's crust - such as
arsenic, mercury and lead - fluoride is by far the most abundant. Normally, only
minute amounts of these elements are found on the earth's surface, but industry
mines vast tonnages - none in greater quantity than fluorine, which is most
often found in the form of calcium fluoride.
As early as 1850,
fluoride emissions from the iron and copper industries poisoned crops,
livestock, and people. By the turn of the century, lawsuits and burdensome
regulations threatened the existence of these industries in Germany and England.
In 1933, when the
world's first major air pollution disaster struck Belgium's Meuse Valley.
Several thousand people became violently ill and 60 died. Kaj Roholm, the
world's leading authority on fluoride hazards, placed the blame on fluoride.
It was abundantly clear
to both industry and government that US industrial expansion would necessitate
releasing millions of tons of waste fluoride into the environment. It was
equally clear that US industrial expansion would be accompanied by complaints
and lawsuits over fluoride damage on an unprecedented scale.
Liability
into Asset
During the industrial
explosion of the 1920s, the US Public Health Service (PHS) was under the
jurisdiction of Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, a founder and major
stockholder of the Aluminium Company of America (Alcoa). In 1931, a PHS dentist
named H. Trendley Dean was dispatched to remote towns in the West where drinking
water wells contained high concentrations of natural fluoride. His mission: to
determine how much fluoride people could tolerate without sustaining obvious
damage to their teeth. Dean found that teeth in these high-fluoride towns were
often discoloured and eroded, but he also reported that they appeared to have
fewer cavities than average.
The University of
Cincinnati's Kettering Laboratory, funded largely by top fluoride-emitters such
as Alcoa, quickly dominated fluoride safety research. A book by Kettering
scientist (and Reynolds Metals consultant) E J Largent, was admittedly written
in part to "aid industry in lawsuits arising from fluoride damage."
Nonetheless, the book became a basic international reference work.
In 1939, ALCOA-funded
scientist Gerald J. Cox was one of the first to note that "... the present
trend toward complete removal of fluoride from water and food may need some
reversal." Cox also proposed that this "apparently worthless
by-product" might reduce cavities in children. Cox fluoridated lab rats,
concluded that fluoride reduced cavities and declared flatly: "The case
should be regarded as proved."
In 1939, the first
public proposal that the US should fluoridate its water supplies was made, not
by a doctor, or dentist, but by Cox, an industry scientist working for a company
threatened by fluoride damage claims.
Undoubtedly, most
proponents were sincere in their belief that the procedure was safe and
beneficial. Nonetheless, their unquestioning endorsement of fluoridation made
possible a master public relations stroke. If the leaders of dentistry,
medicine, and public health supported pouring fluoride into the public's
drinking water - proclaiming to the nation that there was a "wide margin of
safety" - how were they going to turn around later and say industry's
fluoride pollution was dangerous?
If fluoride could be
introduced as a health-enhancing substance that should be added to the
environment for the children's sake, those opposing it would look like quacks
and lunatics.
ALCOA Foils
Accountability
The name of the company
with the biggest stake in fluoride's safety was ALCOA - whose name is stamped
all over the early history of water fluoridation.
By 1938, the aluminium
industry (which then consisted solely of ALCOA) was placed on a wartime
schedule. During World War II, industry's fluoride pollution increased sharply
because of stepped-up production of ALCOA aluminium for fighters and bombers.
And fluoride was the aluminium industry's most devastating pollutant.
Following the war,
hundreds of fluoride damage suits were filed around the country against
producers of aluminium, iron and steel, phosphates, chemicals, and other major
polluters.
Most of the lawsuits,
particularly those claiming damage to human health, were settled out of court,
thus avoiding legal precedents. In a rare exception, a federal court found in
Paul M. and Verla Martin v. Reynolds Metals (1955) that an Oregon couple had
sustained "serious injury to their livers, kidneys and digestive
functions" from eating "farm produce contaminated by [fluoride]
fumes" from a nearby Reynolds aluminium plant.
ALCOA and six other
metals and chemical companies joined with Reynolds as "friends of the
court" to get the decision reversed. Finally, in a time-honoured corporate
solution, Reynolds mooted the case by buying the Martins' ranch for a hefty
price.
"Friends" of
Children
The post-war casualties
of industrial fluoride pollution were many - from forests to livestock to
farmers to smog-stricken urban residents - but national attention had been
diverted by fluoride's heavily publicized new image. In 1945, shortly before the
war's end, water fluoridation abruptly emerged with the full force of the
federal government behind it.
In that year, two
Michigan cities were selected for an official "15-year" comparison
study to determine if fluoride could safely reduce cavities in children, and
fluoride was pumped into the drinking water of Grand Rapids.
In 1946, despite the
fact that the official 15-year experiment in Michigan had barely begun, six more
US cities were allowed to fluoridate their water.
In 1947, Oscar R.
Ewing, a long-time ALCOA lawyer, was appointed head of the Federal Security
Agency, a position that placed him in charge of the Public Health Service. Under
Ewing, a national water fluoridation campaign rapidly materialized, spearheaded
by the PHS. Over the next three years, 87 additional cities were fluoridated.
The two-city Michigan experiment (the only scientifically objective test of
fluoridation's safety and benefits) was abandoned before it was half over.
The Father of All Spin
Doctors
The government's
official reason for this unscientific haste was "popular demand." This
enthusiasm was not really surprising, considering Oscar Ewing's public relations
strategist for the water fluoridation campaign was none other than Sigmund
Freud's nephew Edward L. Bernays.
Bernays, also known as
the "father of public relations," pioneered the application of his
uncle's theories to advertising and government propaganda. The government's
fluoridation campaign was one of his most enduring successes.
In his 1928 book,
Propaganda, Bernays expounded on "the mechanism" that controls the
public mind. "Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society,"
Bernays wrote, "constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling
power of our country.... our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas
suggested, largely by men we have never been heard of...."
Almost overnight, under
Bernays' mass mind-moulding, the popular image of fluoride - which at the time
was being widely sold as rat and bug poison - became that of a beneficial
provider of gleaming smiles, absolutely safe, and good for children,
The prospect of the
government mass-medicating the water supplies with a well-known rat poison to
prevent a non-lethal disease flipped the switches of sceptics across the
country. But, under Bernays' spell, fluoride's opponents were permanently
engraved on the public mind as crackpots and right-wing loonies.
RETURN TO: FLUORIDE
- The
Greatest Fraud of the Twentieth Century
