Fluoride has long enjoyed a sterling public image as “proven cavity fighter,” bone builder and essential nutrient. The fact of the matter is that it is none of these things, but rather one of the most toxic elements on earth, capable of causing the very problems it is touted to solve. This fact has been widely and successfully concealed for more than half a century, in large part because of an overwhelmingly successful disinformation campaign launched by industrial polluters who infiltrated and lobbied government, controlling and influencing its policies over the years.
The toxicity of fluoride is no secret in scientific circles. According to the
Clinical Toxicology of Commercial Products, fluoride is more toxic than lead and
just slightly less toxic than arsenic1 (first chart), one of the most toxic
substances known. How, then, did the level of fluoride permitted in our public
water supply get to be more than 250 times the level permitted of lead?
Every pollutant is assigned a Maximum Contaminant Level by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The MCL is the highest amount of a contaminant permitted in drinking water. It was established as an enforceable standard by the EPA in the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. As the second chart indicates, the MCL for lead is 15 parts lead per billion parts water (15 ppb), and the MCL for arsenic is 50 parts arsenic per billion parts water (which will be reduced to 10 ppb in January of 2006). However, the MCL set for fluoride by the EPA, protector of our environment, is the equivalent of 4,000 parts per billion (often stated as 4 parts per million). So what’s the story?
Until fluoride emissions from industry were reined in by law, they harmed everything they contacted, scorching vegetation, crippling cattle and wildlife, and making people ill, thus giving rise to environmental law suits. This occurred wherever fluoride was used in manufacturing, in such places as phosphate and aluminum factories and plants where uranium was being enriched for atom bomb production. These catastrophic events eventually led to the requirement that these industries install pollution control devices (also called “wet scrubbers”) to limit their emissions. Faced with the prospect of having to pay top dollar to dispose of their toxic fluoride by-products in hazardous waste sites, the aluminum industry (and later the phosphate fertilizer industry) hatched an insidious plan to turn their hazardous waste into a profit center—by marketing it as a dental prevention tool. They would be subject to massive fines if they put it in our rivers, lakes, oceans, or in the air. In a plot twist worthy of a Spiderman movie, they can now legally dispose of their fluoride waste into your municipal water supply. Facilitating this turn of events is a peculiar Florida law proclaiming that a pollutant is only a pollutant once it reaches the environment.2 Armed with this law, industry can take their captured hazardous waste, label it “product,” and market it as a benevolent contribution to mankind. In a memo written in the summer of 2000, uncovered through the Florida Public Records Act, we find Thomas Reeves, former U.S. Chief Fluoridation Engineer of the CDC, instructing Palm Beach Dental Director, Robert Dumbaugh and other members of the National Center for Fluoride Policy and Research (NCFPR),3 to quit making reference to pollution control devices, and begin calling them “product recovery units.” It is the classic Orwellian redefinition of words.
The carefully crafted pact between government and fluoride-polluting
industries has been around a very long time. In 1928, Andrew Mellon, founder of
ALCOA (Aluminum Company of America), became Treasury Secretary under President
Woodrow Wilson. Conveniently, Mellon now headed the agency that funded the
Public Health Service (PHS). At this point in history (1931 to 1939), the PHS
was seeking to remove fluoride from public water supplies because of the dental
fluorosis—permanent mottling (discoloration) of teeth—that it causes in
children.4 Their position began to move away from the unbiased inquiries of
science in 1939, when Dr. Gerald J. Cox, a biochemist on staff at the Mellon
Institute (owned by ALCOA), proposed that public water supplies in the U.S. be
fluoridated as a public health measure, to prevent tooth decay. This
recommendation was based on his own industry-funded “findings” that sodium
fluoride (a waste product of the aluminum industry) reduced dental decay in rats
(animals not prone to decay). Prior to this, fluoride had been used as a rat
poison.
In 1944, an attorney named Oscar Ewing was put on the ALCOA payroll at an inflated salary. Three years later, he went through the revolving door connecting government and industry. Taking a big pay cut, he became administrator of the Federal Security Agency, of which the Public Health Service was then a division. As administrator of the Federal Security Agency, Ewing vigorously promoted fluoridation.
Also in 1944, the city commissioners of Grand Rapids, Michigan voted to fluoridate the city’s water, despite warnings issued months earlier by the top fluoride scientist of the U.S. Public Health Service. Dr. H. Trendley Dean challenged the vote because he had seen evidence of bone changes and cataracts in areas having high levels of groundwater fluoride. He expressed concern that fluoride would put the elderly at risk, as well as those with kidney problems. But in an amazing flip-flop, within three months he was persuaded to endorse fluoridation and join the experiment.5 His efforts were rewarded with a position as director of the National Institute of Dental Research, and he later was given a senior position in the American Dental Association.
Grand Rapids, fluoridated in 1945, was to have been the test city in the ten-year experiment. During this time, dental decay rates in children were to be compared to the non-fluoridated control city, Muskegon. However, the fluoride forces had no intention of waiting for results of their experiment. In that same year, another city, Newburgh, New York, was fluoridated. A year later, six more US cities added fluoride to their water. In 1947, Muskegon (the control city) was fluoridated, thus ruining the experiment—and failing to substantiate the caries-reducing claims that were made to justify fluoridation.
Between 1947 and 1950, 86 more cities were fluoridated. The Public Health Service gave a public endorsement of fluoridation in 1950, teaming up with the ADA the following year to promote it. Their promotion of fluoridation has become increasingly more aggressive over the years. The ADA’s coercive tactics were revealed in their 1979 White Paper on Fluoridation: "Individual dentists must be convinced that they need not be familiar with scientific reports of laboratory and field investigations on fluoridation to be effective participants in the promotion program and that nonparticipation is overt neglect of professional responsibility.”6
Considering that the toxicity of fluoride had been public knowledge for years, how did the government manage to convince a wary public that it was instead a benign cavity fighter? Enter Edward L. Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, and master manipulator of public opinion, who pioneered the field of public relations. With his massive PR campaign:
Almost overnight … 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, bestowed by a benevolent paternal government. Its opponents were permanently engraved on the public mind as crackpots and right-wing loonies.7
And so it came to pass, in this topsy-turvy world, that scientific truth was suppressed by the money and influence of industrial polluters, aided by the “master of spin” and father of public relations, Edward Bernays. His legacy of crystallizing public opinion using messages and images designed to influence how different segments of the population would think about issues or events is now standard operating procedure for the public relations industry. The term is “greenwashing, ” making toxic products appear harmless and environmentally friendly.
Where fluoridation is concerned, the evidence is in that government’s prime concern is to protect industry—not children’s teeth. The major pollutant being protected when fluoridation first began was sodium fluoride from the aluminum industry. Today, however, it is primarily fluorosilicic acid, a more toxic form, that comes from the wet scrubbers of the phosphate industry. This acid is part of a “hazardous waste liquor” that also contains heavy metals such as lead and arsenic, as well as radioactive materials. Fluorosilicic acid largely replaced sodium fluoride as a fluoridating agent in the 1960s for three reasons: (1) it is less expensive than sodium fluoride (2) scrubber liquor is easily soluble in water and (3) there was a shortage of sodium fluoride. The switch to use of a more toxic form of fluoride was not made public.
Fluorosilicic acid, used in 90% of the fluoridated water supplies in this country, has never been tested for safety. All animal studies of fluoride have involved the use of the less toxic sodium fluoride in distilled water. And these studies, using pharmaceutical, not industrial grade fluoride, have raised some extremely serious health issues in the minds of reputable scientists. This is evidenced by the fact that approximately 1500 members of the EPA’s professional union, including scientists, toxicologists, biologists, chemists, engineers and lawyers, have gone public in their opposition to fluoridation through a powerful statement issued in 1999 by National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 280 senior vice-president, J. William Hirzy, PhD. Dr. Hirzy, putting his professional reputation and career on the line, was following in the footsteps of a growing number of scientists who have dared to risk all and take a strong stand against fluoridation. He continues to do so to this day.
Dr. Albert Schatz, the man who discovered the antibiotic streptomycin, is widely quoted as saying that fluoridation is “the greatest fraud that has ever been perpetrated, and it has been perpetrated on more people than any other fraud has.”8 Between 1962 and 1965, Dr. Schatz studied the relationship between artificial water fluoridation and infant mortality in Chile. His studies showed a significantly higher rate of both congenital malformations and death among infants in fluoridated communities than infants in non-fluoridated areas. While the University of Chile awarded him an honorary degree for his work with fluoride, and the Chilean government curbed fluoridation due to his finding, the editor of the Journal of the American Dental Association, Dr. Leland C. Hendershot, ignored letters from Dr. Schatz telling of his research. In fact, after receiving no reply to his first letter to Dr. Hendershot, Dr. Schatz wrote three more letters to him in 1965, and all were returned to him unopened, having been refused by Dr. Hendershot.9 This is disturbingly typical of the treatment received historically by scientists who find any problems associated with fluoride.
Dr. Phyllis Mullenix was another pivotal scientist who suffered the wrath of the fluoride forces. She was terminated from her position as head of the toxicology department of the Forsythe Dental Center in Boston. This was her reward for publishing a paper on the neurotoxicity of sodium fluoride in rats in the prestigious Neurotoxicology and Teratology Journal in 1995.10 Her landmark study established conclusively that fluoride crosses the blood/brain barrier. (Very few substances can cross this barrier, whose job it is to protect the brain from toxic exposure.) Dr. Mullenix’s impeccably designed study found that when pregnant rats regularly ingested fluoridated water, their offspring were born hyperactive and remained hyperactive for life. The opposite occurred when the ingestion of fluoridated water occurred after birth: young rats and adult rats became slow and lethargic—hypoactive. One reason given Dr. Mullenix for her termination was that she had been unable to secure funding to continue her research. This is not uncommon: research funds typically go to researchers whose findings benefit those funding the research. And funding largely comes from industry—or government, the lapdog of industry.
Still another prominent scientist, Dr. William Marcus, who was senior science advisor and toxicologist in the Office of Drinking Water, was fired from his position at the EPA in 1990. Marcus blew the whistle when he discovered that the published findings of a National Toxicology Program animal study downplayed and suppressed the actual cancer risk posed by fluoride.11 Following a two-year lawsuit against the EPA, Dr. Marcus was reinstated with back pay, benefits and compensatory damages.
Where is the bias coming from in the EPA? It was EPA chemist Ervin Bellack who actually came up with the idea of using phosphate pollution as a fluoridation agent. This position was reinforced in 1983 by U.S. EPA Office of Water Deputy Administrator Rebecca Hamner, who articulated the following EPA policy: “In regard to the use of fluosilicic (fluorosilicic) acid as a source of fluoride for fluoridation, this agency regards such use as an ideal environmental solution to a long-standing problem. By recovering by-product fluosilicic acid from fertilizer manufacturing, water and air pollution are minimized, and water utilities have a low-cost source of fluoride available to them.”12 In other words, to avoid polluting the environment with the fluoride waste, they put it in our drinking water and we pay them for the privilege of drinking it. What a sweet deal for government and industry!
The dark truth about fluoridation is reaching the public despite all attempts to squash it, and opposition is growing. However, it’s usually government officials who make fluoridation decisions, without a vote from the citizens. In Pinellas County in August of 2003, the county commissioners quietly voted to put fluoride in our water, which was done—despite citizen opposition—in June of 2004. Pinellas County citizens have now been put in the ludicrous position of being the end users of hazardous toxic waste from the pollution control devices of the phosphate industry. It is, ironically, a simple fact that any water that goes down our drains rather than into our bodies (and even the water that passes through our bodies) will still potentially end up in the lakes, streams, rivers and oceans. As the African proverb says, “Water may flow in a thousand channels, but it all returns to the sea.” We have a problem with a hazardous waste in our water, and it will only be solved by an informed and active citizenry.
The following books on fluoridation are highly recommended and available through amazon.com:
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1 Barry Groves, Fluoride: Drinking Ourselves to Death, Newleaf, 2001, p. 91(based on LD50 data from Robert E. Gosselia, et al, Clinical Toxicology of Commercial Products, 5th edition, 1984.)
2 Glasser, G., “The Official Spinning of Pollution into an Elixir,” www.fluoridealert.org/g-glasser.htm, 2000.
3 The NCFPR is a pro-fluoridation lobby organization.
4 ww.curezone.com/dental/fluoride.asp
5 Bryson, Christopher, The Fluoride Deception, Seven Stories Press, New York, NY, 2004
6 “Should Natick Fluoridate?” by the Fluoridation Study Committee, Natick, MA, 9/29/97)
7 Joel Griffiths, “Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalist Ploy?”, Covert Action, Fall 1992, vol. 42, p. 63.
8 Philip R N Sutton, The Greatest Fraud: Fluoridation (Susan Sutton, Lorne 1996)
10 http://fluoridealert.org/mullenix-interview.htm
11 http://ishgooda.nativeweb.org/nuclear/fluoride1.htm
12 1983 letter written by Rebecca Hanmer, then Deputy Assistant Administrator for Water at the United States Environmental Protection Agency
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Information on this site is for educational purposes only and is not to be construed as medical advice. If you have a medical or dental condition, please consult an appropriate health care provider.