Health officials delayed report linking fluoride to brain harm

So we know that there is definitely little benefit from ingesting fluoride, and also that we can not rule out negative effects from ingesting fluoride. This seems like... a bit of a big deal?

This reminded me of an old CAQ/CAIB article I read in the '90s on the impact of fluoride as an industrial pollutant. I found a copy[1] hosted at a site operated by the "Fluoride Action Network", which is also hosting other alarming claims such as:

> • As of July 18, 2022, a total of 85 human studies have investigated the relationship between fluoride and human intelligence.

> • Of these investigations, 76 studies have reported that elevated fluoride exposure is associated with reduced IQ in humans.

- https://fluoridealert.org/studies/brain01/

There's a historical link between fluoride alarmism and the far right, famously parodied in Kubrick's Dr Strangelove in the person of Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper[2,3] who instigates a nuclear response to the communist conspiracy to impurify America's bodily fluids via fluoride.

The CAQ article at [1] explains this:

> Oscar Ewing, as Federal Security Agency administrator, was a Truman “fair dealer” who pushed many progressive programs such as nationalized medicine. Fluoridation was lumped with his proposals. Inevitably, it was attacked by conservatives as a manifestation of “creeping socialism,” while the left rallied to its support. Later during the McCarthy era, the left was further alienated from the opposition when extreme right-wing groups, including the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan, raved that fluoridation was a plot by the Soviet Union and/or communists in the government to poison America’s brain cells.

> It was a simple task for promoters, under the guidance of the “original spin-doctor,” to paint all opponents as deranged–and they played this angle to the hilt. For example, one widely distributed dossier on opponents “listed in alphabetical order reputable scientists, convicted felons, food faddists, scientific organizations, and the Ku Klux Klan.”

I should note that CAQ has itself been attacked as communist propaganda, (and for that matter, some of the studies linked on the fluoridealert site are Chinese in origin.) Nonetheless the article[1] has some interesting and (to me) surprising information on the politically entangled history of fluoride. An excerpt:

> One thing is certain, 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.

> Throughout industry’s “roaring 20s,” the U.S. Public Health Service was under the jurisdiction of Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, a founder and major stockholder of ALCOA. In 1931, the year Mellon stepped down, a Public Health Service dentist named H. Trendley Dean was dispatched to certain remote towns in the West where drinking-water wells contained high concentrations of natural fluoride from deep in the earth’s crust. Dean’s mission was to determine how much fluoride people could tolerate without obvious damage to their teeth–a matter of considerable concern to ALCOA. Dean found that teeth in these high-fluoride towns were often discolored and eroded, but he also reported that they appeared to have fewer cavities than average. He cautiously recommended further studies to determine whether a lower level of fluoride in drinking water might reduce cavities without simultaneously damaging bones and teeth, where fluoride settles in humans and other animals.

> Back at the Mellon Institute, ALCOA’s Pittsburgh industrial research lab, this news was galvanic. ALCOA-sponsored biochemist Gerald J. Cox27 immediately fluoridated some lab rats in a study and concluded that fluoride reduced cavities and that: “The case should be regarded as proved.”28 In a historic moment in 1939, the first public proposal that the U.S. 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.29 Cox began touring the country, stumping for fluoridation.

1: https://fluoridealert.org/content/fluoride-commie-plot-or-ca...

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4XhhTF7vRM

3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKR32ImWYzw

When people destroy their natural healthy teeth to put on veneers, it's very far on that.

When people destroy their teeth enamel, it's very far on that too.

Destroying your natural teeth for an extra shade of blinding white or marginally straighter teeth is insane, and quite common.

I don’t brush my teeth because I don’t want the residual fluoride there.

It’s healthier to just slosh some vodka around to kill the germs (this wouldn’t work with kids, but hey they’ll lose their first teeth so who cares).

We can all agree that somewhere in between is certainly the preferred option. Walking around with all veneers or crowns is a problem, but so is walking around with constant cavities and yellow teeth, so likely somewhere in between what the US does and the EU does.