Guest Column: Fluoride’s case against conspiracy-ism
The diatribe against fluoridation in the news and in politics is more than worrisome. I am reminded of my appointment by then Gov. Rudy Perpich with University of Minnesota professor of pharmacology M.W. Anders and Mitchell Hamline School of Law professor Michael K. Steensen (chairman) and the intense effort by our commission in the late 1970s to determine the veracity of unsupported challenges to the safety of fluoridating municipal water supplies.
The 1967 Minnesota state law mandated fluoridation in our state and regulations were enacted statewide in 1969 that municipal water supplies would contain an average concentration of fluoride at 1.2 milligrams per liter. The community of Brainerd bridled with this law to fluoridate their city water supplies but in the Minnesota State Board of Health v. City of Brainerd (1976) case, “the Minnesota Supreme Court found the fluoridation law to be constitutional.” Gov. Perpich’s Commission on Fluoridation (yes, our governor had been a dentist in the Range) entrusted the commission to provide an in-depth investigation of the safety of a common public health practice unequivocally endorsed by the World Health Organization as well as the Center for Disease Control and the American Dental Association.
