The Fluoride Deception

Veteran investigative journalist Christopher Bryson’s new book on the highly controversial subject of fluoride could not come at a more important time.

On March 22, 2006, a prestigious 12-member panel of the National Research Council completed a three year review of the appropriateness of the Environmental Protection Ageny's (EPA) safe drinking water standard for fluoride (the Maximum Contaminant Level Goal, or MCLG). After one of the most thorough and objective reviews of the literature in 60 years, the NRC panel unanimously found that the MCLG is too high and has asked EPA to lower the standard in order to protect children against severe dental fluorosis and to protect all groups from bone fracture. They have asked the EPA to perform a risk assessment to determine what the standard should be.

In a society where asbestos, lead, silica, beryllium and many other carcinogens have found their way into the marketplace and then been recalled, one has to wonder why fluoride, so toxic it is used as a rat poison and pesticide, is embraced so thoroughly and so blindly.

With the narrative punch of Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action and the commitment to environmental truth-telling of Erin Brockovich, The Fluoride Deception documents a powerful connection between big corporations, the U.S. military, and the historic reassurances of fluoride safety provided by the nation’s public health establishment.

The Fluoride Deception shows that fluoride pollution was one of the biggest legal worries facing additional key U.S. industrial sectors during the Cold War. And the book documents how a hitherto-secret group of corporate attorneys, known as the Fluorine Lawyers Committee, whose members included U.S. Steel, Alcoa, Kaiser Aluminum, and Reynolds Metals, commissioned research at the Kettering Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati to "provide ammunition" to those corporations who were then fighting a tidal wave of citizen claims for fluoride injury. The research was directed by Dr. Robert A. Kehoe, more famous for his lifetime defense of the safety of leaded gasoline. When the half million dollar medical study showed that fluoride poisoned lungs and lymph nodes in laboratory animals, the research was buried, until Bryson dug up a copy during research for his book. One leading scientist who reviewed the 40-year-old Kettering study suggested that its non-publication might have been responsible for an epidemic of emphysema among key sector of the industrial workforce.

Christopher Bryson has reported science news stories for media outlets such as the BBC and the Christian Science Monitor, and for the Discovery Channel through NBC and ABC News Productions. He was part of an investigative team at Public Television that won a George Polk Award for “The Kwitny Report.” The book has an introduction by Theo Colborn, co-author of Our Stolen Future (1996), which was the subject of a PBS Frontline documentary, and a postscript by the 2000 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, Dr. Arvid Carlsson.

The Fluoride Deception reads like a thriller, but one supported by 200 pages of source notes, years of investigative reporting, scores of scientist interviews, and archival research in places such as the newly opened files of the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission. The book is nothing less than an exhumation of one of the great secret narratives of the industrial era; how a grim workplace poison and the most damaging environmental pollutant of the cold war was added to our drinking water and toothpaste.

A chronicle of the abuse of power and of the manufacture of state-sponsored medical propaganda, The Fluoride Deception reveals how military and industry scientists and public health officials buried information about fluoride’s potential for human harm, while promoting its use in dentistry.

The Fluoride Deception reveals that fluoride pollution was the greatest legal threat facing the wartime Manhattan Project. And the book documents how a secretive group of powerful industries, who all faced extensive litigation for flouride pollution, collaborated with the Institute of Dental Research to launder flouride’s image. We’ll meet the dissident scientists who warned us about fluoride from the beginning. We’ll sit with the famous doctor who’d alerted America in the 1950’s to the dangers of cigarette smoking, who reported that fluoride was a systemic poison, with tens of thousands of citizens uniquely sensitive to even tiny doses. We’ll walk the cobbled streets of Donora, Pennsylvania, in the shrouded aftermath of the nation’s most notorious air pollution disaster in 1948, and meet the scientist who blamed -fluoride for the deaths.

Today, that scientist joins a growing number of health experts who call fluoride a venomous and hydra-headed poison. They suspect its involvement in a host of modern illnesses, including arthritis, bone cancer, and emphysema, and a spectrum of central nervous system disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and the epidemic of attention deficit disorder sweeping America’s children.

Christopher Bryson is an award-winning Columbia Journalism School-trained investigative reporter and television producer. After reporting on Guatemalan Army human rights abuses from Central America in the late 1980s for the BBC World Service, National Public Radio, and The Atlanta Constitution, he won a George Polk Award for work at Public Television’s The Kwitny Report. In 1998, he was part of a team that won a National Headliner award at ABC News Productions for a History Channel documentary on the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

It is my sincere hope that Christopher Bryson's apparently thorough and comprehensive perusal of the scientific literature on the biological actions of fluoride and the ensuing debates through the years will receive the attention it deserves and that its implications will be seriously considered.--Arvid Carlsson, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Medicine

The Fluoride Deception reads like a whodunit. . . .We are left with compelling evidence that powerful interests with high financial stakes have colluded to prematurely close honest discussion and investigation into fluoride toxicity.--Chemical & Engineering News

Previous authors have presented the idea of a deception, if not an outright conspiracy, involving fluoride. What makes Bryson's book unique is that it is an up-to-date account supported by indisputable new evidence in the form of declassified correspondence and exhumation of buried studies.--Fluoride

As with landmark titles, such as Silent Spring, Bryson's book is bound to become a seminal volume.--British Columbia Naturopathic Association

With the narrative punch of Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action and the commitment to environmental truth-telling of Erin Brockovich, The Fluoride Deception leads us on a terrifying journey through the history of the industrial use of fluoride, a chemical substance that has risen steadily in status from a deadly environmental pollutant responsible for injuring thousands to a key component in the development of the atomic bomb to a staple ingredient in toothpaste and drinking water all across the United States.

Christopher Bryson is an award-winning investigative reporter and television producer. After reporting on Guatemalan Army human rights abuses from Central America in the late 1980s for the BBC World Service, National Public Radio, and The Atlanta Constitution, he then won a George Polk Award as part of the Jonathan Kwitny investigative team on public television's The Kwitny Report.

Christopher Bryson is an award-winning investigative reporter and television producer. After reporting on Guatemalan Army human rights abuses from Central America in the late 1980's for the BBC World Service, National Public Radio and The Atlanta Constitution, he won a George Polk Award as part of Jonathan Kwitny investigative team at Public Television's The Kwitny Report.

Through the looking glass — Fireworks at forsyth — Opposite sides of the atlantic — General groves's problem — General groves's solution: dr. harold hodge and the university of rochester — How the manhattan project sold us fluoride: newburgh, harshaw, and jim conant's use — A subterranean channel of secret keeping — Robert kehoe and the kettering laboratory — Donora: "a rich man's hocus pocus" — Donora: the public health service investigation — As vital to our national life as a spark plug to a motor car — Engineering consent — Showdown in the west: martin vs. reynolds metals — Fluorine lawyers and government dentists: "a very worthwhile contribution" — Buried science, buried workers — Hurricane creek: the people rule — The damage is done.