Fluoridation in water is a drug by any other name, says Parry Sound reader

Re: Fluoridation of Drinking Water — A drug by any other name.

Fluoride has been proven to make teeth more resistant to acid etching and damage. This can be interpreted to say that fluoride may help prevent tooth decay. This is what my father was told when he graduated with his D.D.S. from the college of dentistry, U of A in the early 1950s. It was the launch date of the new and exciting public health project that involved adding fluoride, in some form or another, into municipal drinking water supplies with the hope of improving dental public health across North America (USA had the big idea, Canada followed like any naive little brother might).

The joke of the day was that dentists were going to educate and fluoridate themselves out of a job. The laboratory research that involved applying sodium fluoride to cadaver teeth and then even to live animal and human teeth proved promising, with a more durable, acid resistant enamel being formed (fluoride creates a strong lattice work with the calcium and other enamel minerals) I recall my father showing us in Grade 6 a fluoride demonstration involving three fresh chicken eggs, one coated with a fluoride paste, one left as is and one that he cracked right away to show us the shell strength.

After soaking the remaining two eggs in an acid solution he demonstrated how much tougher the fluoride treated egg shell was to crack. In comparison, the untreated acid-soaked egg shell had been reduced to a softened skin much like a fresh turtle egg. This was all very cool and convincing, to a Grade 6 class. It shouldn’t be so awe inspiring to educated health-care professionals or government policy advisers. It was topical application of a pure, high-grade fluoride product. (example, toothpaste)

Somewhere, between the lab tests and the health-care mandates and the PR projects, the science or biochemistry that was demonstrated so simply was extrapolated to mean that possibly dosing everyone, wholesale style, with ingested fluoride in drinking water, would be a good idea and would translate to tougher teeth and fewer cavities. That has got to be one of the grossest misinterpretations of a science project ever seen, and to have the health-care establishment accept it so wholeheartedly should leave anyone aghast. The source of the fluoride is even more worrying as they are allowed to use untested technical grade tri fluorosilicate powder, an arsenic-rich byproduct of the lucrative fertilizer production industry that North America is in full support of. Science gone wild!

Seriously though, from a pharmacist’s perspective, and as one who is involved in GMP consulting and veterinary drug manufacturing (Omnivet Pharma Inc.) and human (Medixtracts Compounding Pharmacy) prescription drug compounding (compounding is making a product from scratch using pure, pharmaceutical grade (USP) active ingredients in stable, proven bases) the approach is all wrong, even if the drug (it is identified as an active agent, or drug material in other countries like France and Norway and around the world) was accurately applied. To purposefully orally dose an entire population of taxpaying citizens who are buying drinking water, a responsible governing body (such as a municipality or even a federal government promoting such an idea) must be legislated to use pure, pharmaceutical-grade fluoride sources to ensure a safe, accurate and contaminant free level of this active drug substance.

They are, in effect, compounding in a huge volume. The wildly variable and uncontrolled “dosing” of this active drug, by having it presented in drinking water, means that nobody can truly say for certain how much anyone is really getting as a daily intake. Some of us drink bottled water because we fear all the other pollutants that may be in town water supplies, which means our lawns and the Georgian Bay fish and other aquatic life get more than some of the target audiences. (and not everyone can afford bottled water) Then there are the infants that are fed water-reconstituted baby formulas who get many times more ions of fluoride on a body weight (mg per kg) basis than any adult, and they haven’t even got teeth yet. (and new mothers can hardly afford bottled water) Do not forget about all the “ghost doses” of fluoride that nobody took into account back then when determining the safe daily dose of this toxic halogen.

Fluoride is found in beer, organic jams, soft drinks, boiled rice and potatoes, soups and soft drinks, that may all be made using good old fluoridated town water supplies (you can not filter out fluoride ions as easily as you can chlorine).

The popular slogan spouted by some physicians and other supporters towing the Health Canada fluoridation line is that we must use fluoride in the water to look after the impoverished seniors and marginalized citizens that can not afford toothpaste and fluoride-containing mouthwashes or even access adequate dental care for themselves or their families. That is a bunch of hogwash. A better allocation of government (federal and municipal) funds and education and PR efforts will be to provide free direct-to-the-teeth fluoride products dispensed by local pharmacies and physicians’ clinics and distributed by local Public Health Offices along with a better structure to allow access to dental professionals for controlled dose fluoride treatments and Dental Public Health education.

Did you know that there are studies, detailed and well done, that show that a lifetime exposure to fluoride in drinking water leads to a buildup of this toxic element in the bones that, upon reaching seniors age, with osteopenia and osteoporosis (dissolving and weakening of bones) occurring, a huge dose of released fluoride hits the bloodstream and causes all kinds of issues including being toxic to the thyroid and pituitary glands and even causing muscle weakness and cognitive impairment. And we all just chalked it up to old age! Also some of the evidence touted in support of how effective fluoride is at preventing cavities and killing oral bacteria relies on the fact that it is truly deadly to many strains of friendly gut-balancing bacteria, like its cousin chlorine (a necessary evil to avoid mass water-borne diseases that kill quicker). They must get their facts straight and until then sell us good water and cheap toothpaste.

Like allowing bisphenol-A as a plastics ingredient in everything including baby bottles since the 1970s, until solid evidence of its hormone disrupting and cancer-causing effects was proved and well educated and organized lobbying pressure had that banned, this fluoride idea from the 1950s, that is mired in bad policy and embarrassment-avoiding aversions by the government bodies that have promoted it (responsible for ill effects by way of a class-action suit by the way) will go the way of asbestos, leaded fuel and hiding munitions dumps near big lakes. The practice of fluoridating drinking water is being stopped by many jurisdictions and large cities all over the place. Get educated, get active and get better. Go vote. Water good, fluoride bad.