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Fluoride is back in the news. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., presumably an operative in President-elect Donald Trump’s coming administration, seeks its removal from water treatment systems. I’m bemused because five decades ago, though I was paid to dump the chemical into public drinking water, I briefly rebelled. Skulls and crossbones emblazoned the sacks of sodium fluoride, and I wore a respirator when I emptied the powder into a mixer at a municipal water treatment plant. As mandated by law, we added fluoride to prevent tooth decay, but that skull bothered me.
Calcium fluoride occurs naturally in many aquifers, and it’s recognized that people imbibing water from such sources have fewer dental caries. So fluoride helps prevent cavities, but what kind of fluoride? Have you read the fine print on your toothpaste tube? Consider this from a common brand: Active ingredient sodium fluoride … Warning. Keep out of reach of children under 6 yrs. of age. If more than used for brushing is accidentally swallowed, get medical help or contact a Poison Control Center right away.
Sodium fluoride is toxic. It’s linked to cancer, to respiratory disease, to kidney and liver damage, to neurological problems. It’s in toothpaste and municipal drinking water, but the chief use of fluorine-based compounds is industrial. They’re essential for refining bauxite into aluminum, and for producing refrigerants, insecticides, pesticides, fertilizers, lubricants and other products. The substance I added to the mixer was not a natural constituent of groundwater but a by-product of commercial applications.
Circa 1950, the chemical business lobby convinced the American Dental Association (ADA) and the Public Health Service (PHS) that sodium fluoride could serve in place of calcium fluoride. Note that the PHS was directed by a former attorney for Alcoa Aluminum, a big industrial user, and one member of the ADA’s three-person advisory committee had financial interest in fluoride. Was substitution a means to monetize an industrial by-product?
There were skeptics, but with dentists and public health officials on board sodium fluoride advocates prevailed. An isolated pocket of resistance was in Brainerd, Minn.
In 1967, the Minnesota Legislature passed a bill to compel statewide fluoridation. Brainerd objected and held a city referendum in 1972. The vote was 1,863 opposed to the chemical, 199 in favor. Nevertheless, the city lost a court case in 1974, wherein the government maintained that “the state has a substantial interest in fluoridating the public drinking water to prevent tooth decay.” Really?
