Thirty years ago Lake Nakuru had a pink flamingo population. Their pinkness came from the lake...they were what they ate. Flamingos are sensitive to water quantity and quality...and tourists think they’re pretty. So flamingos equals tourists equals foreign currency equals economic benefits. The way Classical Economics works is that if there are benefits then money can be spent off-setting them with costs...but only if you really have to...or you have someone you know (like your own contractors or even consulting company) to give the money to.
Then there are a few hitches in the economic method. For starters it is assumed that there is someone willing and able to pick up the tab for these benefit off-sets and someone else with the know-how to solve the matter costs are being lavished upon. Then there is the manner in which dollar signs are attributed to these costs and benefits.
Cost-Benefit Analysis has nothing to say about the distribution of costs and benefits and takes no position on whether or not there is any money available to invest in any capital works from which the benefits and costs are deemed to flow over time. Then there is Net Present Value theory which I won't go into here. Taken together these makes a nonsense of Economic Appraisals.
As for the fluoride, economics could not begin to grapple with this because any benefits depended upon a complex function that at the low end might be positive but at the high end was very very definitely seriously negative. Bones start breaking, mice get nasty things happening to them, teeth start mottling…and no scientist was willing to risk his or her neck about the long term consequences. The New Zealand Pure Water Association and Fluoride Action Network have links casting doubts on the veracity of fluoridation’s healthiness.
In Imperial Times the Kenyan Colonial Authorities sunk boreholes around the town of Nakuru to supply the town with water. The water came from the groundwater of the Rift Valley and was high in all sorts of chemicals…including fluorides. So it was diluted with surface rainwater flowing off the Aberdares to make sure it was drinkable. The Turasha Dam was to be built high in the Aberdares. Its size…and any staged development programme…depended upon forecasts of the growth of Nakuru and of its water needs…not necessarily the same thing.
The phased development of the groundwater sources also entered the equation along with the appropriate water mix…surface and aquifer…at different times of the year. In those days the Kenyan Ex-Patriots worked with the notion that rain came twice a year…a long rains and a short rains. This complicated matters…and was only a little bit true.
So the scene is set. I was interested in how high fluoride levels could be allowed to rise…while along the corridor the Sewerage Project was concerned about increasing water levels in the lake and its chemical composition because they didn’t want the pink flamingos to turn blue or fly off to the film set of The Constant Gardener up at Lake Rudolf.
In 1944 DuPont was producing weapon-grade uranium for the Manhatten Project. A major by-product of the process was the pollutant fluoride, which was producing death and disease on nearby farms. The farmers set out to sue DuPont, the Food and Drug Administration, Agriculture and Justice departments, the Manhatten Project, the US Army and the War Department. While the US Army’s Chemical Warfare Service undertook fluoride testing round New Jersey, Manhatten Project directors convinced farmers, including those suffering from fluoride poisoning, of the government’s good faith, before the government spiked their lawsuit by concealing how much fluoride DuPont had let fly. ‘Disclosure would be injurious to the military security of the United States.’ You ain’t kidding!
It gets worse but let’s go back to 1941 for another strand in this twisted tale. In 1991 Covert Action Quarterly put out an article entitled Fluoride: Commie Plot or Capitalist Ploy?. Fluoridation was simply the aluminium industry dumping toxic waste at a profit. The villains of the piece were the Mellon Institute, the Mellon Family’s cash cow Alcoa, the American Aluminium Company and one-time Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.
Both these accounts of the hidden history of the push for fluoridation are pretty dark tales of industrial companies seeking to spin their toxic dumping into a profitable health benefit. But you can’t fool all the people all of the time. In the US, 60% of voters have been against fluoridation of their water supplies…and a third of American cities have managed to resist the contamination of their tap water. In the UK, water companies were permitted to fluoridate for the first time in 1985. But in 1995 Yorkshire Water refused to do so, not because they thought anti-fluoridators were a bunch of cranks but rather because they said, ‘we know which way public opinion rides’. We will see if this attitude survives the take-over of Yorkshire Water by the Essen-based power and utilities conglomerate RWE. But meanwhile the independent Welsh Water remains fluoride-free and refers to fluoride as a ‘toxic and potent chemical’.
In 2002 the Medical Research Council reported to the Department of Health that while fluoridation benefited teeth ‘much of the current evidence on benefits of fluoride comes from research conducted several decades ago’. By 2003 only five million of England’s population of sixty million had fluoridated water. There are better ways to cut down on dental caries without exposing 80% of the population to fluoride poisoning. Ralph Nader says that...and has done so for years.
