Evening star., 1953-09-09
In Defense Of FIuoridution

Excuse me, but seem to have come
in little late. Would some one please
tell me how the Citizens Committee on
Fluor1dation stands on the subject of
chlorination? Were it not for chlorina-
ton Of water, there would not be
enough starry-eyed citizens left to form
quorum, let alone committee, on the
fuoridation Of water. They would all
have passed long since to that same
quarter Of heaven that is reserved for
the innocents who do not believe in
smallpox vaccination, another form of
mass medication"
The committee seems not to be above
reSorting to scare words, which are
calculated to impress the moronic
third of our adult population. For ex-
ample, Miss Vera Adams warns that
we will no longer have water to drink
at all, but a chemical solution"
Sounds deadly, doesn't it? But has Miss
Adams or any Of her committee ever
tried drinking distilled water? AS a
routine chemist, have, many times. A
more inSipid beverage can hardly be
imagined. I much prefer the "chemi-
cal solution" that flows from our fau-
Gets, in our streams, springs and wells
"a dilute solution Of chlorides, nitrateS.
and - yes - f1uorideS. But some real
water fanciers go even farther than I.
They drool nostalgically over the sweet
water that used to come from the well
back on the farm. All too often that
water owed its sweetness to seepage
from the barnyard, but it was at least
a. lr;, HI 6r,
the nature-loving members of citizens
committees.
can blow the case against fluorida-
ton into a cooked hat by single per-
sonal instance. My mother is now 81,
and still has 80 teeth. She has two
small cavities which she religiously has
checked by her dentist, without refill
ing, every year. She was born in Gen.
tral City, Colo, where the natural
waters contain more fluorides than are
ever added to water by any municipal
water works. A similar resistance to
tooth decay has been observed in all
localities where fluorides are naturally
present in the drinking water supply.
It is true that a discoloration of the
tooth enamel occurs among people who
were born in localities where the f1uo-
ride content is excessive, but that only
happens when the percentage is nine
or ten times as great as is ever added
to the water supply by the water works.
1t was my father, by the way, who first
made the discovery that flourides had
any connection with tooth enamel.
think what really bothers the earn
xdThn fn
health measures as chlorination, fluori-
dation, vaccination and pasteurization
is that such practices are not natural"
Well, ladies and gentlemen, you cannot
have it both ways. You can either have
natural society, whose number is
continually so limited by disease, neg
lect and inter-tribal feuding that it
can never get so large as to pollute its
own water and food supply, or you can
have civilized society which takes
artificial means to preserve thousands
of useful lives that would otherwise
have been snuffed out by the blind
operation of natural selection, but you
cannot have both.
The arguments of the opponents of
fluoridation remind me of the attitude
of the Malays toward boiling their
water during cholera epidemics. They
believed that boiling their drinking
water destroyed the life that was in it.
In this belief they were tragically cor
rect. Boiling destroyed the organism
that caused Asiatic cholera. Conse-
quently. in an epidemic, the Malays
died likes flies, while the Chinese. who
boiled their water to make tea. usually
survived to take their tidy little for
tunes back to their native provinces.
Murray v. Churchill.