The fluoride fights are a decades-old cultural war that America can’t quit

Folks reported strange things in a New York town in 1945, right after the government announced an experiment adding tiny amounts of fluoride to the municipal drinking water.

“Dozens of Newburgh residents called the water department to complain that the water was discoloring their saucepans, hurting the flavor of carbonated beverages and causing digestive upsets,” the Washington Evening Star reported on Feb. 22, 1951.

One Newburgh resident demanded restitution from the city, claiming her false teeth dissolved overnight in a glass of tap water.

The same thing happened in North Carolina, where residents of Charlotte flooded the city water department with complaints of illness not long after the water fluoridation program was announced there in 1949.

All of these complaints? They came before the fluoride had actually been added to the water.

The callers had only heard this would happen. Newspapers described it as something used in some insecticides, but didn’t mention that it is a mineral naturally occurring in water and soil.

“By the time the compound was put in,” the Evening Star wrote, “... complaints had ceased.”

And so began the fluoride wars, a decades-long battle of science, urban myth, emotion and passionate division.

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

Tooth decay had long been a profound public health issue in America.

“Not one person in 10 had a mouth full of teeth,” Willard VerMeulen told The Washington Post in a 1988 interview when he described his dental practice in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the 1930s. The dentist went on to describe the Saturday morning routine of extracting scores of rotten teeth from the mouths of children.

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

In the 1940s, bad teeth was the top reason the Selective Service booted aspiring soldiers from the Army. About 17 percent of recruits didn’t have “six opposing teeth,” according to the American Dental Association.

By then, American scientists researching fluoride believed they may have come across a simple antidote for better dental health.

It began in 1901, when a dental school graduate from the East Coast headed west to open his first practice and was startled by the pronounced brown stains on the teeth of his patients in Colorado Springs.

Curiously, Frederick McKay observed that the folks with “Colorado Brown Stain” had otherwise remarkably healthy teeth.

McKay began researching this, and was joined by others hopscotching from Colorado to Idaho to Arkansas, following reports of other brown-toothed children.

The answer finally came exactly 30 years after he met his first mottled tooth. The chief chemist at a company in Pennsylvania, exhausted after years refuting claims that aluminum cookware was poisonous, tested a water sample from one of the brown-tooth towns and found high levels of fluoride.

The early research focused on how to reduce the fluoride levels on some water sources across the nation. The idea was to get rid of the brown stains, the result of over-fluoridation called fluorosis.

“Scrub, Scrub, Scrub, Just Like Tub,” read the headline of a 1941 story in the Albuquerque Tribune advising people of ways to eliminate the stains.

Eventually, H. Trendley Dean, head of the Dental Hygiene Unit at the National Institutes of Health, homed in on the benefits of the fluoride and sought to determine levels that strengthened the teeth but didn’t stain them.

The Grand Rapids experiment was his first chance to try this out.

Within 11 years of the 15-year experiment, the level of tooth damage from decay dropped by 60 percent among the city’s children, according to the National Institutes of Health.

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

The fear of fluoridation, however, began to bloom.

“The German chemists (under Hitler) worked out a very ingenious and far-reaching plan of mass control,” read one of the many letters opposing fluoridation that were published by the Hartford Courant in February 1955.

A reader in the Chippewa Herald-Telegram in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, urged editors that same year to alert FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that fluoridation programs should count as an “attempt at poisoning the public water supplies.”

Historians have debunked the myth of Nazi involvement, and scientists have knocked down scores of theories centering on singular and weird examples of health issues.

The growing dissent may have had something to do with that moment in American culture. Widespread fluoridation was beginning as part of the “long list of social developments that swept into the public conscience on the wings of scientific achievement,” R. Allan Freeze and Jay H. Lehr wrote 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 power and the widespread development of genetically altered food.

“Like the pasteurization of milk and the iodization of salt, fluoridation was delivered publicly rather than privately,” they wrote. “Those that wished to avoid the governmental benevolence had to work to do so.”

As hundreds of studies were published establishing the dental benefits of fluoride and debunking medical concerns, the nation continued to see hundreds of votes, lawsuits and legislative battles over the practice.

A Canadian paper, the Kingston Whig-Standard, boiled the conflict down in a 1972 editorial that said, “This is not a public-health issue. It is a civil rights issue.”

NIH calls it an “achievement ranking with the other great preventive health measures of our century.”