USA - Whatever You Do, Don't Stop Paying Attention to the Fluoridation Debate

By Jim Schutze
I have a column in the newspaper this week about drinking water fluoridation and a controversy that kicked up recently when three Dallas City Council members responded politely to an anti-fluoridation activist. Dallas Morning News columnist Jacquielynn Floyd was acerbic, choleric and apoplectic, invoking the Red Scare, Howdy Doody and Davy Crockett to convey the insult she felt the anti-fluoridationists had inflicted on the city by casting doubt on the practice of putting fluoride in the water to prevent tooth decay.
Right after she lambasted the council members for not lambasting the activists, the local dental society issued a statement calling the activists fear-mongers and urging public officials not to listen to them. I say in my piece in the paper that the dentists behind that one may have been out of dental school too long.

You may have to be certain age to understand the furor of dentists and pundits when confronted with any criticism of fluoridation. I'm that age and a half, so I do get it. Putting fluoride in drinking water was one of the grand symbolic gestures of the 1950s, when polio was being cured and science and technology were rampant on a field of seemingly endless victories. The people who rose up against fluoride really were the troglodytes, and everyone who has gone through dental school since then has been taught to deride and despise them.

See also: In Dallas, an Anti-Fluoride Movement for Once Not Dismissed

But this is no longer a dental school issue. In my column I refer you to an article in the February issue of the Lancet, the medical journal that has chronicled every major medical breakthrough from Louis Pasteur's discovery of the principle of vaccination to the discovery of a possible cause for SARS disease. The article, "Neurobehavioral effects of developmental toxicity," is a global survey of research on neurotoxins and human brain development.

One thing I learned from it -- something I sure missed if it has been in the news much -- is that fluoride is one of six chemicals added since 2006 to a list of what are now 11 known causes of diminished or deformed brain development in human fetuses and infants.

There's a big caveat to be stated right here. The authors of this paper make no claims up or down about the safety of water fluoridation in the United States. The studies they refer to measuring human I.Q. loss associated with fluoride were all carried out in China, and the authors point out that fluoride dosages to which children are exposed there may well be higher than what children and pregnant women experience here from drinking water.