Figures & Fluorides

Citizens who want to get their teeth into solid facts on effects of water fluoridation had their answer last week in a 28-page pamphlet by a statistician who has at his fingertips more figures on health and disease, life and death, than any man living: Louis Israel Dublin.

Dr. Dublin's conclusion: the case for fluoridation is watertight.

It was one of the most authoritative blows yet struck for the pro-fluoride side in the passionate U.S.-wide controversy over doctoring public drinking water. For half a century Lithuanian-born Dr. Dublin, 74, has been translating statistics into weapons for the war against disease. From 1909 to 1952, as head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.'s statistical branch, he amassed data from the health records of 30 million policyholders.

From Control to Plans. Statistician Dublin's punch-card tabulators accurately foresaw, 20 years in advance, the great U.S. decline in the incidence of TB. He was among the first to focus attention on the growing menace of diabetes and the role of obesity in shortening life, and he sometimes spotted epidemics-in-the-mak-ing in faraway cities before local health officers did. A stocky, peppery father of four, he cried alarm in the '30s over the declining U.S. birth rate, persuaded birth-control proponents to change their pitch to planned parenthood, and was delighted when the post-World War II baby boom invalidated his forecast that the U.S. would become a nation of oldsters.

Now retired from Metropolitan but still working hard, Dr. Dublin dug into the fluoridation controversy, spent a year in statistical research. In his report (Water Fluoridation: Facts, Not Myths, published by Manhattan's Public Affairs Committee), he likens the opposition to fluoridation to the bombing of Cotton Mather's house in 1721 because Mather urged vaccination against smallpox, and the early 20th century fanaticism that drove public health workers out of some towns for advocating chlorination of water.

Statistician Dublin's most sweeping statistic: "Next to the common cold, tooth decay is probably the most universal disease suffered by mankind." His most precise: men and women aged 40 to 44 who have spent their lives in areas with naturally fluoridated water average only three missing teeth; those in non-fluoride communities average 14. Tooth decay has declined 54% to 60% among youngsters in city after city where fluoridation has been practiced for about ten years.

By the Bathtubful. Are fluorides poisonous? Yes, says Dr. Dublin--in the same way as common salt, oxygen and water, which "can kill you if you get too much of them." But, he adds, "to absorb a lethal amount of fluoridated water would require drinking 50 bathtubfuls at a sitting ... To produce even the mildest symptoms of fluoride poisoning would require that the victim swallow two-and-a-half bathtubfuls . . . during a single day."

Dr. Dublin's smallest statistic is his most impressive. Searching for cases where any harm to health, even among the aged and ailing, is attributable to fluorides, he found not one.

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