Can we have a civilized talk about the U.S. water fluoridation industry? [View all]

[JackRiddler]

Fluoridation of drinking water is not practiced in any of the world’s industrially developed countries outside the “Anglosphere” of the United States, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as about half of Canada and parts of the UK.

In matters of environmental issues as well as dental health, my default position is to accept the word of scientists, doctors and trained technicians and experts. In this case, for various reasons, I happen to prefer the word of the scientists and experts guiding policy in most of the industrial countries outside the United States.

(Necessary digression: NO! I don’t believe water fluoridation is a communist plot to poison our bodily fluids, or to prevent us from having dreams. In addressing the issue of the fluoridation industry I prefer to argue from evidence, and I haven’t seen evidence for any of that.)

The following chart shows tooth decay trends for “unfluoridated” and “fluoridated” nations since the 1960s, based on the United Nations World Health Organization country index for “DMFT” – a measure of the rate of decayed, missing, or filled teeth among 12 year-olds:



For decades the DMFT index has declined radically in all developed countries. It is true, as fluoridation advocates hold, that the period of fluoridation in a few countries has coincided with a dramatic decline in tooth decay in the same countries. It has also coincided with equally dramatic declines in countries that do not fluoridate. Some countries, such as East Germany and other members of the East bloc, fluoridated and then stopped, but the decline in DMFT continued there as well.

This evidence serves to falsify the hypothesis that water fluoridation was a major factor in improved dental health, and suggests that improved dental health results from other economic factors or public health policies. Fluoridation advocates agree that the supposed dental benefits come only from topical application, which almost everyone in industrial nations, including most of the poorest of children, already perform every day with a toothbrush and a tube.

The fluoride added to drinking water is a by-product of the production of fertilizers and refined aluminum, among other goods, and is classified as a contaminant by the EPA. The producers of fluoride wastes do not pay the full price for the cost of disposing of their pollutants, however. Instead, they are paid untold millions of taxpayer dollars by thousands of communities that then dump fluoride into our drinking water.

Best known among these producers is ALCOA, which during the period before and after the Second World War played the pivotal role (along with the Mellon fortune) in selling fluoridation as a practice that benefits public health. By the 1960s, the John Birch Society, also funded by big right-wing money (the Kochs, in fact), declared fluoridation to be a communist plot, as a consequence helping to discredit any discussion of the issue among reasonable, non-paranoid liberals.

So yes, I do believe that fluoridation of drinking water in the United States stands as an example of governments putting private corporate profits before the interests and rights of the public. It's hard to quantify all the different municipal funds going into the practice (and municipalities tend to obscure by offering statistics on the supposed savings due to the benefits), but it is likely in the low hundreds of millions of dollars per year, about a dollar per capita. I say we save all that public money and put it into programs for children in poverty.

Discuss.

(PS - In reviewing the above, I ran across this link to a 1999 statement in which the employee union local of the EPA headquarters took a stand against fluoridation policy. Remember when that was on the news? Ha ha. http://sdsdw.org/fluoride-facts/why-epa-union-opposes-fluoridation/)