From Publishers Weekly
Concerns over fluoridated drinking water have long been derided as the obsession of McCarthyite cranks. But this muckraking j’accuse asserts that fluoride is indeed a dire threat to public health, one foisted upon the nation by a vast conspiracy—not of Communist agents, but of our very own military-industrial complex. Investigative reporter Bryson revisits the decades-long controversy, drawing on mountains of scientific studies, some unearthed from secret archives of government and corporate laboratories, to question the effects of fluoride and the motives of its leading advocates. The efficacy of fluoridated drinking water in preventing tooth decay, he contends, is dubious. Fluoride in its many forms may be one of the most toxic of industrial pollutants, and Bryson cites scientific analyses linking fluoridated drinking water to bone deformities, hyperactivity and a host of other complaints. The post-war campaign to fluoridate drinking water, he claims, was less a public health innovation than a public relations ploy sponsored by industrial users of fluoride—including the government’s nuclear weapons program. Legendary spin doctors like Edward Bernays exploited the tenuous link between dental hygiene and fluoridation to create markets to stimulate fluoride production and to prove the innocuousness of fluoride compounds, thereby heading off lawsuits by factory workers and others poisoned by industrial fluoride pollution. Bryson marshals an impressive amount of research to demonstrate fluoride’s harmfulness, the ties between leading fluoride researchers and the corporations who funded and benefited from their research, and what he says is the duplicity with which fluoridation was sold to the people. The result is a compelling challenge to the reigning dental orthodoxy, which should provoke renewed scientific scrutiny and public debate.
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Kurzbeschreibung
T"he Fluoride Deception unearths one of the great secret narratives of our age, 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 book 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 book documents how a secretive group of powerful industries, who all faced extensive litigation for fluoride pollution, collaborated with officials from the National Institutes of Dental Research, laundering fluoride's public image, and helping industry off the hook. 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 1950s 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 carnage. And, when a superstar industry-funded toxicologist is fired in 1995, after discovering that fluoride affects the central nervous system, we'll uncover a stunning connection to the WWII atomic bomb program. 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, andemphysema, and a spectrum of central nervous system disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and the epidemic of attention deficit disorder sweeping America's children.
