UK - Asked by Earl Baldwin of Bewdley

Asked by Earl Baldwin of Bewdley

To ask Her Majesty's Government, with regard to the statement on the website of the National Fluoride Information Centre in the section Water, "Like 'York' [the British Medical Research Council] concluded that areas of concern in the past no longer required any further investigation", (a) which areas are referred to, and (b) in which sections of the York report these conclusions can be found. [HL3571]

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Earl Howe): We understand that the National Fluoride Information Centre is referring to concerns about whether the fluoridation of water is effective in improving oral health. A Systematic Review of Water Fluoridation published by the NHS Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at the University of York concluded that "The best available evidence from studies on the initiation and discontinuation of water suggests that fluoridation does reduce caries prevalence, both as measured by the proportion of children who are caries free and by the mean dmft/DMFT [decayed missing and filled teeth]".

Not according to this http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/fluoridnew.htm

What evidence we found suggested that water fluoridation was likely to have a beneficial effect, but that the range could be anywhere from a substantial benefit to a slight disbenefit to children's teeth.

This beneficial effect comes at the expense of an increase in the prevalence of fluorosis (mottled teeth). The quality of this evidence was poor.