Fluoridation Fails Again

Not since 1939, when a Harvard lad wearing skirts won the Wellesley College hoop-rolling contest, had the tweedy, well-heeled people of Wellesley, Mass. (pop. 26,071), been so riled up. Tempers boiled; upstanding citizens denounced one another in public meetings, over TV and in newspaper ads. The issue: a proposal to put sodium fluoride in Wellesley's drinking water. In the upshot, the generally well-off and well-educated citizenry of Wellesley voted down the proposal emphatically. along with two neighboring towns, Brookline and Andover.

Fine Bond Fides. The value of adding minute quantities (i.e., one part per 1,000,000) of sodium fluoride or a related compound to drinking water to reduce tooth decay among children is beyond scientific dispute. Only last week, the Washington, D.C. Public Health Department reported that an eight-year fluoridation program there has reduced dental caries among children in the seven-year-old age group by 63.5%. Nearly 2,000 U.S. communities, with a population of 38 million, fluoridate their water. The practice is endorsed by the American Dental Association, the American Medical Association, the U.S. Public Health Service.

Yet fluoridation fails to get approval in most referendums, whether in Boston suburbs or anywhere else in the U.S. (places that fluoridate generally do so as the result of decisions by city managers or councils). The reason is that psychologically the issue lends itself to the purposes of otherwise insignificant political fringe groups. Playing on the populace's anxieties, they can get on a winning side and look more influential than they are.

Brittle Bones & Soft Brains? In Massachusetts, fluoridation's proponents included Harvard Nutritionist Frederick J.

Stare, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Corporation Chairman James R.

Killian Jr. It was supported openly by half of the 250 doctors and dentists who live or work in Wellesley, 93 out of 94 dentists in Brookline.

In the key Wellesley campaign, the chief opponent was the Rev. Andrew G.

Rosenberger. 42, a retired Unitarian clergyman who grew rich selling "nature foods," and is currently awaiting trial on a federal charge of misbranding products.

His far-right-hand man was Laurence E.

Bunker, a forn. -- aide of General Douglas MacArthur. and a member of the council of the semisecret, archconservative John Birch Society (TIME, March 10). Additional support came from Boston's antimedicine Christian Science Monitor.

"Fluoride is a poison," said Rosenberger in speeches. Bunker noted darkly that the Daily Worker had supported fluoridation, and insisted: "This is not a question on which any group has a right to vote. No group has a right to force taxpayers to take medicine not recommended by their own doctor." Anti-fluoridation groups in other states helpfully flooded Massachusetts with leaflets implying that fluoridation causes cancer and brittle bones and hinting that its proponents are acting on orders from Moscow to soften American brains. Throughout the campaign Rosenberger kept in close telephone contact with Seattle Radiologist Frederick B.

Exner, anti-fluoridation strategist, lecturer and pamphleteer.

The net effect was to raise a thousand doubts, a why-take-a-chance anxiety. So "Mr. Tooth Decay," as the man on television puts it, won again.

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