Veteran investigative journalist Christopher Bryson’s new book on the highly controversial subject of fluoride could not come at a more important time.

On March 22, 2006, a prestigious 12-member panel of the National Research Council completed a three year review of the appropriateness of the Environmental Protection Ageny's (EPA) safe drinking water standard for fluoride (the Maximum Contaminant Level Goal, or MCLG). After one of the most thorough and objective reviews of the literature in 60 years, the NRC panel unanimously found that the MCLG is too high and has asked EPA to lower the standard in order to protect children against severe dental fluorosis and to protect all groups from bone fracture. They have asked the EPA to perform a risk assessment to determine what the standard should be.

In a society where asbestos, lead, silica, beryllium and many other carcinogens have found their way into the marketplace and then been recalled, one has to wonder why fluoride, so toxic it is used as a rat poison and pesticide, is embraced so thoroughly and so blindly.

With the narrative punch of Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action and the commitment to environmental truth-telling of Erin Brockovich, The Fluoride Deception documents a powerful connection between big corporations, the U.S. military, and the historic reassurances of fluoride safety provided by the nation’s public health establishment.

The Fluoride Deception shows that fluoride pollution was one of the biggest legal worries facing additional key U.S. industrial sectors during the Cold War. And the book documents how a hitherto-secret group of corporate attorneys, known as the Fluorine Lawyers Committee, whose members included U.S. Steel, Alcoa, Kaiser Aluminum, and Reynolds Metals, commissioned research at the Kettering Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati to "provide ammunition" to those corporations who were then fighting a tidal wave of citizen claims for fluoride injury. The research was directed by Dr. Robert A. Kehoe, more famous for his lifetime defense of the safety of leaded gasoline. When the half million dollar medical study showed that fluoride poisoned lungs and lymph nodes in laboratory animals, the research was buried, until Bryson dug up a copy during research for his book. One leading scientist who reviewed the 40-year-old Kettering study suggested that its non-publication might have been responsible for an epidemic of emphysema among key sector of the industrial workforce.

Christopher Bryson has reported science news stories for media outlets such as the BBC and the Christian Science Monitor, and for the Discovery Channel through NBC and ABC News Productions. He was part of an investigative team at Public Television that won a George Polk Award for “The Kwitny Report.” The book has an introduction by Theo Colborn, co-author of Our Stolen Future (1996), which was the subject of a PBS Frontline documentary, and a postscript by the 2000 Nobel Prize winner for Medicine, Dr. Arvid Carlsson.

The Fluoride Deception reads like a thriller, but one supported by 200 pages of source notes, years of investigative reporting, scores of scientist interviews, and archival research in places such as the newly opened files of the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission. The book is nothing less than an exhumation of one of the great secret narratives of the industrial era; how a grim workplace poison and the most damaging environmental pollutant of the cold war was added to our drinking water and toothpaste.