The Fluoride Deception [Anglais] [Relié]

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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A chronicle of the abuse of power and of the manufacture of state sponsored medical propaganda, The Fluoride Deception reveals how military and industry scientists and public health officials buried information about fluoride's potential for harm, while promoting its use in dentistry.

The book reveals that fluoride pollution was the greatest legal threat facing the Manhattan Project and how a group of powerful Cold War industries, who all faced extensive litigation for fluoride pollution, collaborated with officials from the National Institutes of Dental Research, laundering fluoride's public image.

We'll sit with the famous doctor who reported in the 1950's 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 aftermath of the nation's most notorious air pollution disaster in 1948, and meet the scientist who blamed fluoride for the deaths. And, when a superstar 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, and emphysema, and a spectrum of central nervous system disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and attention deficit disorder.

"Christopher Bryson is an excellent narrator, and he reports on recent research previously not known to me. Especially I am intrigued by the story about Phyllis Mullenix and her animal research on the influence of fluoride on behavior and brain development. . . . It is my sincere hope that his book will receive the attention it deserves and that its implications will be seriously considered." Dr. Arvid Carlsson, 2000 Nobel Prize Laureate for Medicine

"In much the same way biologist Rachel Carson warned us over forty years ago in Silent Spring about the havoc and harm being caused by the misuse of persistent pesticides, journalist Christopher Bryson here lays bare the secret story and hidden dangers of the introduction of fluoride chemicals from the cold war era into our drinking water. The irrefutable evidence of duplicity and cover-up presented in this book is hair-raising. The Fluoride Deception presents a scorching indictment of how researchers and health care officials working closely with government agencies, big industry, and their attorneys have allowed themselves to surrender their responsibility for the medical well-being of their fellow citizens." Dr. Albert W. Burgstahler, former president of the International Society for Fluoride Research and Emeritus Professor of Organic Chemistry, University of Kansas

"Bryson is right on in his emphasis on the ineffectiveness of fluoridation of water with industrial wastes, and its risks of nerve and brain damage, and cancer, coupled with the long-standing industrial conspiracy to suppress this information." Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition and Professor Emeritus of Environmental and Occupational Medicine, University of Illinois School of Public Health

"The Fluoride Deception compellingly and inescapably exposes the murderous fraud that heads of state and industry have for decades perpetrated on an innocent public. Extremely well written and tightly researched, The Fluoride Deception is sure to become the ‘must read’ book in this important and burgeoning field." Derrick Jensen, author of The Culture of Make Believe and A Language Older Than Words

Christopher Bryson is an award-winning investigative reporter and television producer. He covered Guatemalan Army human rights abuses from Central America in the late 1980s for the BBC World Service, National Public Radio, and the Atlanta Constitution. In 1988 he was part of an investigative unit that won a George Polk Award with Jonathan Kwitny at Public Television’s The Kwitny Report. In 1998, he was a member of a team at ABC News Productions that won a National Headliner Award for a History Channel documentary on the bombing of Pan Am flight 103. In 1999 he won a Project Censored Award with Joel Griffiths for their first linking of the U.S. Army Manhattan Project to public water fluoridation. Bryson lives in New York City with his wife, Molly, and son, Owen.