It was supposed to be a solution for dental problems under childeren and the poor, but because most of you here are anti-everything and ultra negative you probably won't accept this simple, positive and good-willed solution.

Fluoridation of community drinking water began in Grand Rapids, Michigan on January 12, 1945. It was the brainchild of two people who worked for Andrew W. Mellon, founder of the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), Drs. H. Trendley Dean and Gerald J. Cox. Mellon was US Treasury Secretary, which made him (at that time, in 1930) head of the Public Health Service (PHS). He had Dean, a researcher at the PHS, study the effects of naturally fluoridated water on teeth. Dean confirmed that fluoride causes mottling (discoloration) of teeth, and he hypothesized that it also prevents cavities....Sodium fluoride, a by-product of aluminum smelting, initially was used to fluoridate water. Silicofluorides (fluoride combined with silicon), wastes of phosphate fertilizer production, are now used almost exclusively for fluoridation.

Doctors and public health officials did not think sodium fluoride, used commercially as a rat and bug poison, fungicide, and wood preservative, should be put in public water. The Journal of the American Dental Association said (in 1936), "Fluoride at the 1 ppm [part per million] concentration is as toxic as arsenic and lead… There is an increasing volume of evidence of the injurious effects of fluorine, especially the chronic intoxication resulting from the ingestion of minute amounts of fluorine over long periods of time." And the Journal of the American Medical Association" noted (in its September 18, 1943 issue), "Fluorides are general protoplasmic poisons, changing the permeability of the cell membrane by certain enzymes."

Vast amounts of fluoride were required to build the atom bomb. Fluoride combines with uranium to form the gas uranium hexafluoride, which, when passed through a semi permeable membrane, separates bomb-grade, fissionable uranium-235 from the much more abundant and stable uranium-238. This done, fluoride is released into the environment as waste. (During the Cold War millions of tons of fluoride were used in the manufacture of bomb-grade uranium and plutonium for nuclear weapons.) Also, large amounts of fluoride were generated in producing aluminum required for warplanes. With several instances already on record of fluoride causing damage to crops, livestock, and people downwind from industrial plants, government and industry, lead by officials running the Manhattan Project, sought to put a new, friendlier face on fluoride. This would dampen public concerns over fluoride emissions and help forestall potentially crippling litigation. Instead of being seen as the poison it is, people should view fluoride as a nutrient, which gives smiling children shiny teeth, as epitomized in the jingle that calls fluoride "nature's way to prevent tooth decay." It worked. Early epidemiological studies showed a 50 to 70 percent reduction in dental cavities in children who drank fluoridated water. These studies, however, were poorly designed. None were blinded, so dentists examining children for caries would know which kind of water they were drinking. Data gathering methods were shoddy. By today's evidence-based medicine standards these studies do not provide reliable evidence that fluoride does indeed prevent cavities.