Christopher Bryson
London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, h/back, £17.99
Causes cannot chose their supporters. The anti-EU case isn’t helped by its being associated with the fascist and near-fascist right all over Europe. The animal rights case against halal and kosher slaughtering methods wasn’t helped by it being taken up by the British National Front in the 1980s. If the American anti-fluoride campaign in the 1950s wasn’t making much headway against the consensus among public health officials and dentists that fluoride was (a) harmless and (b) prevented tooth decay, it wasn’t helped by being adopted by the John Birch Society.
Their belief, that fluoridation was part of the international communist conspiracy, was put into the mouth of the character Jack. D. Ripper, the demented commander of the US Air Force base in England, who had dispatched nuclear bombers towards the Soviet Union, in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove. Audiences – me included, aged 15 when I saw the film –laughed and consigned the anti-fluoridation lobby to the outer, loony fringe with the terminal description: too weird to even consider. And we were all wrong. Fluoride is toxic and it probably doesn’t even prevent decay.
On the back of the increasing awareness of, and anxiety about, the polluted industrial environment, the anti-fluoride case has crawled out of the sandpit and has shaken itself free of the most destructive associations. This terrific, massively documented book does tell that story; but the big story it tells is how fluoride got into the water supplies in the first place.
In extreme brevity: making nukes in WW2 in America produced thousands of tons of fluoride waste – a disposal problem of major proportions, since fluoride was long recognised as being a dangerous material. Seizing on one piece of research done in the 1930s which seemed to show that people who drank water with higher than average natural fluoride had fewer dental cavities, the administrators of the Manhattan Project, persuaded ‘the authorities’ that it would be a good idea to put fluoride in America’s water, solving their toxic waste disposal problem: they could dump it in reservoirs. This has been documented since some Manhattan Project papers were released in the 1990s – papers which showed that the relevant scientists attached to the Manhattan Project knew that fluoride was a toxic substance which damaged the brain and the body’s skeleton.
That’s the core of this bizarre and terrible story: a false consensus, created as a by-product of nuclear weapons development, based on almost no evidence and with no tests, which remains in place today.