Did Pennsylvania town buy into conspiracy theories about water fluoridation effort started in Grand Rapids?
Since officials first began adding fluoride to the Grand Rapids water supply in 1945, the pioneering practice has been hailed as one of the nation’s 10 great public health achievements of the previous 100 years.
A small town in southeast Pennsylvania wants no part of it.
Officials in Myerstown, Penn., officially stopped adding fluoride to the municipal water supply there on Jan. 31 after Water Authority Board members questioned a potential hazard posed to employees handling the chemical.
According to a report in the Lebanon Daily News, the water board members based their decision on an American Dental Association re-evaluation of fluoride application, which the organization denied even doing in the report.
Daily News reporter Steve Snyder quotes Water Authority Board chairman Dan Flanagen as saying the ADA “now recommending that fluoride should be administered topically instead of being ingested.” But Flanagen may not have done his homework before making that claim.
Snyder, quoting an official notice sent to customers referencing “conflicting opinions” about the benefits of water fluoridation, alludes to a connection between the decision and a long-running suspicion of water fluoridation kept alive by websites that allege fluoride’s connection to brain damage, cancer, birth defects and a host of other nasty ailments.
The Fluoride Action Network maintains a list of cities like Myerstown that have stopped adding fluoride to the municipal water supply. Their reference map is included below.
The websites have been dismissed by public health officials as ‘pseudo-science’ distributing misinformation fanned by conspiracy theories. A longform piece by Jessie Hicks for the nonprofit Chemical Heritage Foundation traces the fluoride backlash to Steven’s Point, Wis., and missteps by fluoridation advocates there in response to a fluoride critic Alexander Y. Wallace, who organized a referendum against water fluoridation.
Wallace was dismissed by the fluoridation committee, who banked on the public accepting their scientific research into the health benefits of fluoride, which combats and reverses tooth decay. Big mistake: On September 19, 1950, the citizens of Stevens Point, Wis., rejected fluoridation by a vote of 3,705 to 2,166. Writes Hicks:
Water fluoridation, although it eventually became a widely accepted practice across the country, never quite shed the yoke of conspiracy. With cold-war paranoia on the rise, fluoride became a favorite target of anti-Communist rhetoric.
Wired Magazine ran a story on the controversy earlier this year, noting that while roughly 170 million Americans drink fluoridated water today, and statistics show that dental health in the United States has improved dramatically as a direct result of it, the long reach of the internet has kept opposition to fluoride alive.
In Grand Rapids, the city’s system provides fluoridated water to the city and suburban communities. The city briefly considered dropping the pioneering program in 2008 over concerns about long-term effects from what many consider a toxic chemical.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a proposed reduction in the recommended fluoride level to 0.7 milligrams per liter of water, a move that was supported by the West Michigan Dental Society.
The Centers for Disease Control continues to maintain water fluoridation as as safe and reliable way to prevent tooth decay. The American Dental Association continues to endorse fluoridation of community water.
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Below: A Google map compiled by the Fluoride Action Network, an anti-fluoridation organization, that denotes municipalities they claim have discontinued water fluoridation since 1990.
