A comment on scientists and fluoridation

The news that US scientists have been offered money to produce contrarian evidence to mitigate concern about global warming brings to mind a precedent (see Philip's blog item for 9th Feb 2007).

During World War 2, the team of defence scientists working on the Manhattan Project – the race to make the atomic bomb ahead of Germany – co-opted a dentist who was paid to fabricate a convincing case for the public consumption of gaseous Hydrogen fluoride, the spent chemical used for Uranium enrichment.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of this chemical, supplied originally by the DuPont de Nemours Corporation, was standing in holding tanks. It was so toxic and corrosive it could not be released into the environment and dumping it at sea was not an option, but adding it, a drop at a time, to everybody’s water supply, apparently was. Thus was born the practice of ‘fluoridation’.

The dentist? He was given the task of working up the theory (still unvalidated even today), that the presence of natural insoluble Calcium fluoride in groundwater somehow conferred a degree of resistance to tooth decay among children. The notion went like this: If Calcium fluoride was beneficial, why not Hydrogen fluoride? Ignoring the very grave and significant differences between the two materials, a thesis was concocted which ‘proved’ the theory. The US Environmental Protection Agency was leaned on to support it and a multi-million dollar programme was launched to promote ‘Fluoride – the Magic Bullet for Kids’ Teeth’ in all anglophile countries having a nuclear capability. This, of course, included us in the UK.

The flawed science supporting fluoridation was passed around in professional and academic circles and many students would have taken it on board as part of their studies, consolidating the thesis as a kind of ‘gospel’, immune from negative criticism.

Deeper thinking people, including uncorrupted scientists who opposed the idea, were overruled by the US Defense Department which insisted that fluoridation was necessary in the interests of national security. Even the 1500 white coats working for the EPA who jointly signed a lengthy and scientifically reasoned statement condemning fluoridation policy, were blasted by the American Dental Association which attempted to rubbish the integrities of all of them.

Today, those ADA members who took part in professional character assassinations have been replaced with a successive generation of younger and more enlightened personnel. A recent communiqué tells us that the ADA has issued a stern warning to the global trader Wal-Mart to stop selling fluoridated ‘baby-water’, promoted for making up formula feeds, on account of its threat to infant health. It should come as no surprise to learn that a substance, powerful enough in concentrated form to corrode glass would, diluted even at 1 or 2 mg per litre, also attack tooth enamel and displace bone calcium over a period of time short enough to guarantee dental fluorosis before teen age; and full scale skeletal fluorosis well before middle age.

So, will it take a new generation of scientists to lead the way to combat global warming where our present leaders, mired in economic theory, cannot ditch the spin to act fast enough; and have we enough time left to wait until they do?

Bernard J Seward,
Avon, Glos & Wilts Safe Water Campaign,
Bristol