Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (5 page)

It is crucial to recognise from the outset that fluoride is a highly toxic substance. Appreciation of this simple point makes it easier to understand the natural reluctance on the part of some to accept without question the compulsory ingestion of a poison to obtain partial control of what would generally be regarded as a noncommunicable disease. The potent toxicity of fluoride and the narrow limits of human tolerance (between 1-5 ppm) make the question of optimum concentration of paramount importance.

FLUORINE WASTES-A MAJOR POLLUTANT

The fluoridation controversy becomes even more interesting when we realise that industrial fluorine wastes have since the early 1900s been one of the main pollutants of our lakes, streams and acquifers, causing untold losses to farmers in regard to the poisoning of stock and crops.

Fluorides such as hydrogen fluoride and silicon tetrafluoride are emitted by phosphate fertilizer manufacturing plants (phosphate rock can typically contain 3 percent fluoride). The industrial process of steel production, certain chemical processing and particularly aluminium production which involves the electrolysis of alumina in a bath of molten cryolite (sodium aluminium hexafluoride) all release considerable quantities of fluorides into the environment. The fluorides emitted are readily absorbed by vegetation and are known to cause substantial leaf injury. Even in concentrations as low as 0.1 ppb (parts per billion), fluorides significantly reduce both the growth and yield of crops. Livestock have also fallen victim to fluoride poisoning caused primarily by ingesting contaminated vegetation.
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It is reported that the Aluminum Corporation of America (ALCOA) was confronted by annual claims for millions to compensate for the havoc wreaked by their fluorine wastes. It was in 1933 that the United States Public Health Service (PHS) became particularly concerned about the poisoning effect of fluoride on teeth determining that dental fluorosis (teeth mottled with yellow, brown and even black stains) occurred amongst 25-30 percent of children when just over 1 ppm of fluoride was present in drinking water.
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By 1942 the PHS, largely under the guidance of Dr. H. Trendley Dean, legislated that drinking water containing up to 1 ppm of fluoride was acceptable. The PHS was not at this stage introducing fluoridation—it was concerned mainly to define the maximum allowable limit beyond which fluoride concentrations should be regarded as contaminating public water supplies. Dean's research investigations also indicated that although 1 ppm fluoride concentration caused enamel fluorosis or mottling in a small percentage of children (up to 10 percent), it also served to provide partial protection against dental decay.
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HOW IT ALL STARTED

Dean was also well aware that fluoride concentrations of as little as 2 ppm could constitute a public health concern, causing severe dental fluorosis. Coincidentally, the U.S. PHS was at the time sponsored under the Department of the Treasury, the chief officer of which was Andrew Mellon, owner of ALCOA. In 1939 The Mellon Institute (established and controlled by the family of Andrew Mellon), employed a scientist, Dr. Gerald Cox, to find a viable market for the industrial fluoride wastes associated with the production of aluminium. Of this intriguing series of connections between the interests of ALCOA and the story of fluoridation Walker writes:

In 1939, Gerald Cox, a biochemist employed by the University of Pittsburgh, was undertaking contract work for the Mellon Institute.

At a meeting of water engineers at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, he first put forward his idea to add fluoride to public water supplies.
By 1940, Cox had become a member of the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council, and he prepared for this illustrious body a series of submissions strongly promoting the idea of artificial fluoridation.
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Dennis Stevenson also comments about this connection between Dr. Cox, ALCOA and fluoridation but somewhat more cynically. He writes:

Dr. Cox then proposed artificial water fluoridation as a means of reducing tooth decay. What better way to solve the huge and costly problem of disposing of toxic waste from aluminum manufacturers than getting paid to put it in the drinking water? What an incredible coincidence— ALCOA and the original fluoridation proposal.
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Nor do the chain of seeming coincidences end here.

Caldwell refers to the very interesting testimony of Miss Florence Bir

The Missouri State Bureau of Dental of more than 6,500 lifelong

Facts About Fluoride

TOOTH DECAY IS NOT REDUCED BY WATER FLUORIDATION!

A computer analysis of the data from the largest dental survey ever done—of nearly 40,000 school children—by the Institutes of Dental Research revealed no correlation National between

tooth decay and fluoridation. In fact, many of the non-fluoridated cities had better tooth decay rates than fluoridated cities. The city with the lowest rate of tooth decay was not fluoridated. Of the three with the highest rate of decay, two were partially fluoridated.

Health had conducted resident secondand a survey sixth-grade overall . children in various parts of Missouri and found that . . there were no significant

fluoridated

differences between children drinking optimally water and children drinking suboptimally fluoridated water. —Albertt W. Burgstahler, Ph.D. Professor of Chemistry, University of Kansas

. . . school districts reporting the highest caries-free rates, were totally unfluoridated. How does one explain this?

—A. S. Gray, D.D.S. Journal of the Canadian Dental Association, 1987

mingham on May 25-27, 1954, before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, which had organised a series of hearings on the fluoridation issue. As President of the Massachusetts Women's Political Club, Miss Birmingham was on the occasion representing some 50,000 women. She is recorded as saying:

In 1944 Oscar Ewing was put on the payroll of the Aluminum Company of America [ALCOA], as attorney; at an annual salary of $750,000. This fact was established at a Senate hearing and became part of the Congressional Record. Since the aluminum company had no big litigation pending at the time, the question might logically be asked, why such a large fee? A few months later Mr. Ewing was made Federal Security Administrator with the announcement that he was taking a big salary cut in order to serve his country. As head of the Federal Security Agency ... all surveys both here and in Western Europe show that the reduction in [dental] caries over the past 20 years is just as great in unfluoridated as in fluoridated communities.

—John R. Lee, M.D.

Even the Journal of the American Dental Association [states] that "the current reported decline in caries in the U.S. and other

industrialised countries has been observed in both fluoWestern ridated tions in each community apparently about the same."

—Chemical & Engineering News, 1 August 1988

INFANT MORTALITY RATES ARE HIGHEST IN FLUORIDATED CITIES

Figures released by the National Centre for Health Statistics reveal that infant mortality is a big problem in the United States. The data shows that the ten cities with the worst rate of infant mortality have all been artificially fluoridated at least seventeen years or longer!

After the first full year of fluoridation Kansas City, Missouri's infant mortality increased 13 percent.

—The Kansas City Star, 21 November 1982 After the fifth year of fluoridation in Kansas City, infant mortality increased 36 percent.

and nonfluoridated communities, with percentage reduc—The Kansas City Star, 26 February 1987

(now the Department of Health, Education and Welfare), he immediately started the ball rolling to sell "rat poison" by the ton instead of in dime packages ... sodium fluoride was dangerous waste product of the aluminum company. They were not permitted to dump it into rivers or fields where it would poison fish, cattle, etc. Apparently someone conceived the brilliant idea of taking advantage of the drawn from Deaf Smith County, Texas.* The America then began selling sodium fluoride to put in the drinking water.
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erroneous Aluminum conclusions

Company of

* In a footnote Caldwell comments on this point: This refers to a widely circulated report published ties, in which Dr. George Heard, a dentist in Deaf in a popular magazine in the early forSmith County, claimed he had no busi

ness because of the natural fluoride in the water. Later, when Dr. Heard found mottled teeth
too brittle to fill and a rushing business after supermarkets moved in with processed foods, he tried in vain to set the record straight. He could find no publisher for his new information. His original article was entitled "The Town Without A Tootache."
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The series of events which thereafter implementation of fluoridation deserve Grand Rapids, Michigan was selected as the site of the first major longitudinal study of the effects of fluoridation Comparisons were to be made with the city which remained unfluoridated so that it could be used as a control.
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Although the experiment was supposed to be undertaken over the course of ten years to determine any cumulative side-effects which might result from the fluoridation of municipal water, Ewing intervened after only five years to declare the success of the study in showing fluoridation to be safe. As Walker puts it:
led to the apparently inevitable

also to be reviewed. In 1945

on the public at large. of Muskegon, Michigan

In June, 1950, half-way through the experiment, the U.S. PHS under its Chief, Oscar Ewing, "endorsed" the safety and effectiveness of artificial fluoridation; and encouraged its immediate adoption through the States.
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One year later Ewing was able to convince the American Congress that fluoridation was a necessity, and a total of two million U.S. dollars (an enormous sum of money in those days) was immediately directed to promote the fluoridation program throughout the USA.
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While the circumstances surrounding Ewing's achievement were revealing, an even more intriguing set of interconnections was yet to be revealed. Miss Birmingham's testimony had included a statement that "Mr. Ewing's propaganda expert was Edward L. Bernays."
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Her testimony continued:

We quote from Dr. Paul Manning's article: 'The Federal Engineering of Consent." Nephew of Sigmund Freud, the Vienna born Mr. Bernays is well documented in the Faxon book published in 1951 (Rumford Press, Concord, N.H.); Public Relations: Edward L. Bernays and the American Scene. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses must be done by experts, the public relations counsels (Bernays invented the term); "they are the invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions . . . the most direct way to reach the herd is through the leaders. For, if the group they dominate will respond ... all this must be planned . . . indoctrination must be subtle. It should be worked into the everyday life of the people—24 hours a day in hundreds of ways ... A redefinition of ethics is necessary ... the subject matter of the propaganda need not necessarily be true," says Bernays.

If the socio-ethical attitudes expressed in this testimony are associated with the fluoridation programme, it is clear that we have more than just health reasons to be concerned about fluoridation.

In 1979 Chemical & Engineering News
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published a review of a well documented anti-fluoridation book by Waldbott.
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The unashamedly profluoridation review prompted a spate of letters criticising the tenor and content of the review, and re-asserted Waldbott's persuasive case against fluoridation. One letter complained that the reviewer was in fact explicitly urging readers not to take seriously the various reports of fluoride poisoning.
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Another letter writer drew attention to another aspect of the review, saying:

Waldbott does not base his objection to fluoridation merely on dental fluorosis but on the broader issue of individual clinical toxicity. Those of us in clinical practice (and our patients as well) have much to be grateful to Waldbott for in our attention to this aspect of fluoridation problems. The alert clinician who goes beyond the orthodox practice of making diagnoses keyed to organicity and providing symptomatic treatment will find in his practice those individuals who are being made ill by fluoridation. It is this insight that is Waldbott's greatest contribution . . .

A second major point bypassed in the book review is the fact of dramatically increased dietary fluoride exposure, as confirmed by the data of Rose and Marier (Canadian National Research Council), Herta Spencer, Wiatroski, and others, including my own food fluoride study ... It boggles the mind to argue, as the U.S. Public Health Service does, that "optimal" water fluoridation levels should be the same in 1979 as they were in 1943 when food fluoride was essentially negligible.

It is ironic that if fluoridation were to be raised as new concept for the prevention of tooth decay today, the same government agencies that might employ reviewer Burt would reject the proposal without a second thought. It is only an accident of historical scientific naivete that fluoridation became an entrenched public policy. The fact that 100 million Americans (and a large percentage of them against their expressed desire) are subject to the unnecessary ecologic burden of water fluoridation does not make it right...
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Mandatory medication by fluoridation was not of course peculiar to the United States. Australians have for more than three decades been subjected to forced fluoridation of their drinking water. In 1953 the National Health & Medical Research Council of Australia lent its support to the mandatory mass-medication of Australians.
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It is bizarre and disconcerting to find that the introduction of the fluoridation programme into our cities was also linked with political and industrial interplay. These connections have been deftly exposed by Walker and more recently by Wendy Varney in her book, Fluoride in Australia—A Case to Answer.
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