Standard Examiner - Thr, Jan 8, 2004

Guest Commentary: Here's the return on your investment with water fluoridation

By LAURA WARBURTON
Special to the Standard-Examiner

How do you know if your investment in water fluoridation will pay off? Let's examine its track record in other fluoridated communities.

In Kentucky, which is 96 percent fluoridated and has been fluoridating since 1977, 28 percent of preschoolers developed cavities in 1987; that number jumped to 47 percent in 2001, according to the July/August 2003 Journal of Pediatric Dentistry.

In West Virginia, largely fluoridated since 1951, only 27 percent of adults have kept their natural teeth compared to 64 percent in unfluoridated Utah, according to the Centers for Disease Control as published in the 2002 "Public Health and Aging: Retention of Natural Teeth Among Older Adults United States."

This same study also shows that only 13 percent of adults in unfluoridated Hawaii have lost all of their natural teeth, as opposed to 42 percent in Kentucky and 40 percent in West Virginia, both of which have been fluoridated for more than 25 years.

Never-fluoridated Vancouver, Canada, has a lower rate of dental decay than Toronto, Canada, which has been fluoridating for 36 years. This study comes from Dr. Hardy Limeback, BSc, PhD, DDS, associate professor and head of preventive dentistry in Toronto, Ontario. Dr. Limeback is Canada's leading fluoride authority and, until recently, was the country's primary promoter of fluoridation. Dr. Limeback's report is available at www.fluoridealert.org/limeback.htm.

On April 9, 2003, Basel, Switzerland, halted all fluoridation. PRNewswire recently reported that after 40 years of water fluoridation, it has failed to reduce tooth decay; in fact, according to a Swiss government report, children's cavity rates there increased from 1996 to 2001.

Howard Pollick, co-chairman of the California Fluoridation Task Force, a dentist, and a strong proponent of fluoridation, studied 1,230 Head Start children in five different states and found that there was no difference in cavity rates between optimally and non-fluoridated areas. "It may ... be that fluoridation of drinking water does not have a strong protective effect against early childhood caries," he said in the Winter 2003 Journal of Public Health Dentistry.

In fluoridated Detroit, "black children from Detroit's poorest families have among the worst teeth of any group of children in the nation," according to a recent study by professors at the University of Michigan as published on Dec. 18, 2003, by Knight-Ridder Newspapers. It's common for Detroit children as young as 1 or 2 years old to have numerous teeth rotten to their gums, and, by age 5, for more than half to have cavities, and for 35 percent to show initial signs of dental decay, nearly twice the national average.

Recent news articles from New York, Boston and Cincinnati show that tooth decay is at alarming levels despite decades of fluoridation.

In a study of over 24,000 U.S. children, ages 2 to 17 years old, rural children's cavity rates are equal to those of urban children, who are more likely to drink fluoridated water. According to the summer 2003 issue of the Journal of Rural Health, researchers were surprised by fluoridation's apparent ineffectiveness: "The lack of difference in caries (cavities) prevalence between rural and urban children is puzzling. ... Children residing in rural areas are more likely than urban children to use well water, which usually has a low fluoride content."

All of this really should not be surprising since the CDC admitted in its Aug. 17, 2000, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that swallowing fluoride does not effectively prevent tooth decay, but rather topical application works best. By simply brushing your teeth regularly with fluoridated toothpaste, which has 1,000 times the fluoride concentration of fluoridated water, you receive optimum protection.

Given that water fluoridation is not effective in reducing tooth decay by the claimed "up to 50 percent," this makes it a worthless investment. Proponents have never provided any scientifically valid, double-blind studies to support their claims of effectiveness. If proponents' claims are accurate, wouldn't you expect them to be able to ante up the research to support them? Understandably, proponents actively avoid scientific debates on the validity of their claims.

To make this "investment" seem more attractive, proponents also projected that you would enjoy a savings of $80 for every $1 spent on water fluoridation. Your average household investment of $20, multiplied by $80 in promised savings, should net you about $1,600 savings every year. Don't you wish you lived in Holladay, where your $65 per hook-up investment will save you $5,200 per year? A good investor will note that actuarial tables for dental insurance expenses do not reflect whether an area is fluoridated or not. Thus, you will save nothing on your dental insurance premiums because of water fluoridation.

No doubt, proponents will be encouraging citizens to vote to continue fluoridation based upon "not throwing away" the multimillion-dollar "investment" that has already been spent on implementation. As a good investor, you know that continuing to flush down the toilet, to sprinkle onto the grass, to shower down the drain hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in continuing expenses on a worthless investment is against your better judgment.

Laura Warburton is the mother of four children. She lives in Layton.