Benefits?

70 Years of Questionable Benefits

For two generations now, Americans and citizens of other English speaking nations have been repeatedly told that the addition of synthetic fluorides to their drinking water would result in better oral health, meaning lower rates of dental cavities.  ALCOA Aluminum, under the expert guidance of Edward Bernays, gave birth to this message during the 1940s, a time when fluoride pollution lawsuits were rampant in the United States and elsewhere.  (ALCOA was not immune to such lawsuits, and was looking for ways to both dispose of it’s toxic fluoride waste products, and to paint a smiley face on fluoride.)  The message persists to this very day, and to this very day, the notion is unsupported by medical or scientific fact.

H. Trendley Dean, called by some the “Father of Fluoridation” made extraordinary claims in the early 1940s about correlations between the incidence of cavities and the natural fluoride concentrations in public drinking water.  He had been asked by the US Government to study dental fluorosis, the earliest sign of fluoride poisoning, and made the claim that individuals with dental fluorosis have lower cavity rates.  He theorized that there could be an “optimum” fluoride concentration which would prevent cavities, and yet not result in toxicity.  He did two poorly documented studies expounding on his theory, which magically set the “optimum” concentration at 1 part per million.  But even he expected the rate of dental fluorosis to be about 10% of the population at this concentration.  Unfortunately a few years later H. Trendley Dean admitted under oath that his personal bias entered heavily into his conclusions about cavity prevention.

Commencing in 1945, there were 4 trials done in the United States and one in Canada, in which the water supply of one community was fluoridated, and a control community of similar demographics was not fluoridated.  This was pretty much where the adherence to any scientific study standards ended.  Phillip Sutton and other statisticians at the University of Melbourne did detailed analyses in 1960 of these 5 studies.  Each was found to be so filled with errors, omissions and biases that clear conclusions could not be drawn from the studies.  Yet this did not stop the American Dental Association, which had been recruited in 1950 to promote fluoridation,  from making wild claims regarding the effectiveness of fluoridation in preventing cavities.

Overall health has a great influence on oral health, and there are other factors as well.  Refrigerators, antibiotics, vitamins, better diets, more dentists with better technology, home oral care and others have combined to improve oral health in all industrialized nations,  World Health Organization studies show a dramatic decline in tooth decay in both countries which practice fluoridation and those which do not.  This hasn’t stopped the American Dental Society from continuing to make 50%-70% cavity reductions fully attributable to fluoridation, and they remain unable to produce scientific evidence supportive of their claims.

In 1986 and 1987, The National Institute of Dental Research was commissioned by the the United States government to perform a $3 Million study of dental cavities on 39,000 school children, ages 5 to 17, from 84 different areas of the country.  The outcome of the study was that the difference in cavity rates between fluoridated, non-fluoridated and partially fluoridated communities is statistically insignificant.  As fluoridation is a government supported program, the results of this study have received very little media coverage