The fights over fluoride are a decades-old culture war that America can’t stop

People reported strange things in a New York city in 1945, just after the government announced an experiment adding small amounts of fluoride to municipal drinking water.

“Dozens of Newburgh residents called the water department to complain that the water was discoloring their pots and pans, altering the flavor of soft drinks and causing digestive upset,” the Washington Evening Star reported on February 22, 1951.

A Newburgh resident has filed for damages from the city, claiming her false teeth were dissolved overnight in a glass of tap water.

The same thing happened in North Carolina, where Charlotte residents flooded the city’s water department with disease complaints shortly after the water fluoridation program was announced in 1949.

All these complaints? They appeared before fluoride was actually added to the water.

The callers had only heard that this would happen. Newspapers described it as an element used in some insecticides, but did not mention that it was a mineral naturally found in water and soil.

“By the time the complex was installed,” the Evening Star wrote, “…the complaints had stopped.”

Thus began the fluoride wars, a decades-long battle between science, urban myth, emotion and passionate division.

It was a public debate that invoked Nazis and communists, mind control, public poisoning and civil rights. And with President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who promises to end public water fluoridation — to his Cabinet, it’s part of today’s politics.

Tooth decay has long been a serious public health problem in the United States.

“Not one in ten people had a mouth full of teeth,” Willard VerMeulen told The Washington Post in a 1988 interview when describing his dental practice after arriving in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1924 The dentist then described Saturday morning. routine of extracting dozens of rotten teeth from children’s mouths.

Grand Rapids became the first American city to try adding fluoride to its drinking water in 1945.

In the 1940s, bad teeth were the main reason the Selective Service kicked aspiring soldiers out of the Army. About 17 percent of recruits did not have “six opposing teeth,” according to the American Dental Association.

At that time, American scientists researching fluoride believed they had discovered a simple antidote for better dental health.

It all started in 1901, when an East Coast dental school graduate headed west to open his first practice and was surprised by the pronounced brown stains on his patients’ teeth in Colorado Springs .

Interestingly, Frederick McKay observed that people with “Colorado brown spot” otherwise had remarkably healthy teeth.

McKay began researching this topic and was joined by others in hopscotch from Colorado to Idaho to Arkansas, following reports of other children with brown teeth.

The answer finally came exactly 30 years after he encountered his first mottled tooth. The chief chemist of a Pennsylvania company, exhausted after years of refuting claims that aluminum cookware was toxic, analyzed a water sample from one of the Browntooth towns and discovered high fluoride levels.

Early research focused on how to reduce fluoride levels in certain water sources across the country. The idea was to get rid of brown spots, the result of overfluoridation called fluorosis.

“Scrub, Scrub, Scrub, Just Like Tub,” was the headline on a 1941 article in the Albuquerque Tribune advising people on ways to remove stains.

Eventually, H. Trendley Dean, head of the dental hygiene unit at the National Institutes of Health, looked into the benefits of fluoride and sought to determine levels that strengthened teeth without staining them. The Grand Rapids experience was his first chance to try that.

In 11 years after 15 years of experience, the level of dental damage due to decay fell by 60 percent among the city’s children, according to the National Institutes of Health.

As other municipalities began adding fluoride to public water supplies, studies continued to show improvement in children’s dental health.

Fear of fluoridation, however, began to flourish.

“German chemists (under Hitler) have developed a very ingenious and far-reaching plan to control the masses,” read one of several letters opposing fluoridation published by the Hartford Courant in February 1955.

That same year, a reader of the Chippewa Herald-Telegram in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, urged editors to alert FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that fluoridation programs should be viewed as an “attempt to ‘poisoning of public water reserves’.

Historians have debunked the myth of Nazi involvement, and scientists have overturned many theories focused on singular and bizarre instances of health problems.

The growing dissent may have something to do with this moment in American culture. Widespread fluoridation began as part of the “long list of social developments that have swept the public consciousness in the wake of scientific achievements,” write R. Allan Freeze and Jay H. Lehr in their 2009 book, “The Fluoride Wars: How a modest public health measure became America’s longest-running political melodrama.

The authors drew parallels between this public division and the development of nuclear energy and the widespread development of genetically modified foods.

“Like milk pasteurization and salt iodization, fluoridation was public rather than private,” they write. “Those who wanted to avoid government benevolence had to work to achieve it.”

As hundreds of studies were published establishing the dental benefits of fluoride and refuting medical concerns, the country continued to witness hundreds of votes, lawsuits, and legislative battles regarding the practice.

A Canadian newspaper, the Kingston Whig-Standard, summarized the conflict in a 1972 editorial that said: “This is not a public health issue. This is a civil rights issue.

The NIH calls fluoridation “a success story among the other great preventative health measures of our century.”