fluoridation for the people
Internet commenters buzz in and ask the provocative question, which is just a means to start off into some stuff they have
This guy’s been busy. Â (See too down here.)
Ever wonder why Portland has such a long history of opposition to fluoridation?
No. Â Not really. Â Gauging the dates, I have a pretty good idea why, but nonethless we get into this.
It might have something to do with this (excerpt from “The Fluoride Deception” by Christopher Bryson):
Or… it might be — let’s see…
1956 … no. Â This is about the Commies.
1962 … no. Â This is about the Commies still.
1978 … yes. Â No longer fear the Commies.
1980 … no. Â Reagan Revolution, from the ascension of the Christian Right — fighting the United Nations. Â To be fair by this point we do have this “Military Industrial Complex” molding in here to form “new coalition”s, which is where we are scrabbled in 2014.
Sold to New Yorkers as a public-health initiative, the Committee to Protect Our Children’s Teeth had powerful links to the U.S. military-industrial complex, and to the efforts of big industrial corporations to escape liability for fluoride pollution. In 1956, for example, the Committees booklet Our Children’s Teeth was hot off the press. Before most New York parents had an opportunity to read about fluorides wonders, lawyers for the Reynolds aluminum company submitted the booklet to a federal appeals court in Portland, Oregon, where the company had been found guilty of injuring the health of a local farming family through fluoride pollution (see chapter 13). Inside the booklet, the judges were told, “are to be found the statements of one medical and scientific expert after another, all to the effect that fluorides in low concentrations (such as are present around aluminum and other industrial plants) present no hazard to man.” (Today such a pseudo grass-roots effort would be known as an “astroturf” organization because of its fake popular character and essentially corporate roots.) The committee was funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and its goals were to break the political logjam in New York and to help topple dominoes across the country, according to the committee’s program director, Henry Urrows. “That was the working assumption-our justification as far as the Kellogg people were concerned-and it turned out that was quite correct because we broke the back of the anti-fluoridation movement by winning in New York and Chicago,” Urrows told me.
Well they didn’t break Portland!
All very interesting. Â But you do have to say… at least the Communist and Corporate Malfeasors accidentally stumbled into imrpoving the populace’s teeth enamel.
“This really does reshuffle the deck in some fascinating ways that confound traditional lines,” said Phil Keisling, director of the Center for Public Service at Portland State University’s Mark Hatfield School of Government. “It has created some pretty interesting bedfellows on both sides of the ideological divide.”
How interesting? Consider some of those lining up against fluoridation: the Oregon Sierra Club’s Columbia Group, the Portland NAACP, the libertarian Cascade Policy Institute, the Kansas Taxpayers Network and an Indiana-based alternative health company that advocates, among other things, using tanning beds for vitamin D dosage.
On the other side? OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon, the Urban League of Portland, the Northwest Health Foundation, the campaign funds from several Democratic state legislators and conservative talk-radio host Lars Larson.
Hm.
Regretably the Oregonian doesn’t seem to have this letter in their oregonlive page, but there was actually a letter in today’s paper arguing the portion of the water district not getting to vote on the measure, which alludes to a kind of “No Fluoridation without Representation”… could be the slogan that brings the measure down if the part of the district can swing the election.