Who owns fluoride

Dean concludes that people who drink water with a fluoride concentration of 1. He then tries to determine whether drinking water with fluoride at levels too low to cause fluorosis might provide resistance to cavities, similar to that observed in visibly mottled teeth. Gerald J. Cox and a team of scientists from the Mellon Institute at the University of Pittsburgh publish a paper proposing the controlled addition of fluoride to drinking water to prevent tooth decay.

Children tended to have fewer cavities and less severe decay in cities with more fluoride in the community water supply. This effect plateaued at concentrations greater than 1. Building on his findings, Dean concludes that 1. Dean also updates his diagnostic criteria for dental fluorosis. His revised fluorosis index remains in clinical use to this day.

Parts of the article also appear in newspapers nationwide. JADA walks back its criticism of fluoridation in a follow-up editorial, but it reiterates the need for more research before fluoridation can be considered an acceptable public health intervention. Fluoridation trials: A planned year trial of community water fluoridation is launched in four cities. Two other cities with water having a natural fluoride content near 1.

The study included these two cities to see whether fluoride-adjusted water performs differently than naturally fluoridated water. Schoolchildren in all participating cities receive annual dental exams throughout the trial. The Evanston—Oak Park fluoridation trial begins. It is more intricate than the other US trials. This raises the total number of Americans receiving fluoridated tap water to , by the end of the year.

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You will be happy to know that they are all being archived here. Multi-billion dollar international conglomerates, which benefit from tooth decay and fluoride sales, pour money into organized dentistry which is behind virtually every fluoridation initiative. Fluoridation has been hailed by some as a triumph of public health but it was also, as historian Frank Zelko points out this month, a profitable way to put to use a waste byproduct from the production of fertilizer.

While Florida calls itself the Sunshine State, from a geological and economic perspective, it could just as accurately be known as the Phosphate State. The so-called Bone Valley of central Florida contains some of the largest phosphate deposits in the world, which supply global agriculture with one of its most important commodities: synthetic fertilizer.

Phosphate loaded by elevator at Port Tampa, FL in Highly toxic hydrogen fluoride and silicon tetrafluoride gases are by-products of fertilizer production. Prior to the s, these pollutants were vented into the atmosphere and gave central Florida some of the most noxious air pollution in the country. During the s, however, complaints by farmers and ranchers eventually forced reluctant manufacturers to invest in pollution abatement scrubbers that converted toxic vapors into fluorosilicic acid FSA , a dangerous but more containable liquid waste.

The U. Breathing its fumes causes severe lung damage or death and an accidental splash on bare skin will lead to burning and excruciating pain.

Fortunately, it can be contained in high-density cross-linked polyethylene storage tanks. It is in such tanks that fluorosilicic acid has for the past half century been transported from Florida fertilizer factories to water reservoirs throughout the United States. Once there, it is drip fed into drinking water. A worker watching the loading of powder fine phosphate in Mulberry, FL in left. An map of phosphate deposits on the western edge of Florida right.

The practice of adding fluoride compounds mostly FSA and occasionally sodium fluoride to drinking water is known as community water fluoridation. It has been a mainstay of American public health policy since and continues to enjoy the support of government health agencies, dentists, and numerous others in the medical and scientific community. Many are surprised to learn that unlike the pharmaceutical grade fluoride in their toothpaste, the fluoride in their water is an untreated industrial waste product, one that contains trace elements of arsenic and lead.

And without fluoridation, the phosphate industry would be stuck with an expensive waste disposal problem. A map depicting global fluoridated water usage with colors indicating the percentage of the population in each country with fluoridated water from natural and artificial sources.

Only a handful of countries fluoridate their water—such as Australia, Ireland, Singapore, and Brazil, in addition to the United States. Western European nations have largely rejected the practice.

Nonetheless, dental decay in Western Europe has declined at the same rate as in the United States over the past half century. This is not to vilify the early fluoridationists, who had legitimate reason to believe that they had found an easy and affordable way to counter a significant public health problem.

However, the arguments and data used to justify fluoridation in the mid th century—as well as the fierce commitment to the practice—remain largely unchanged, failing to take into account a shifting environmental context that may well have rendered it unnecessary or worse. An advertisement for the pesticide DDT from Time magazine in left. An advertisement from the s for children's wallpaper laced with DDT right.

Today, she said, most middle-class people keep their teeth until they are The main reason for this, Barbara explained, was fluoridation—the practice of putting fluoride compounds in community drinking water to combat tooth decay.

The inevitable but somehow surprising response: People I did not know troubled themselves to tell me that I was an idiot, and that fluoridation was terrible.

Their skepticism made an impression. I found myself staring suspiciously, as I brushed, at my Colgate toothpaste. A thought popped into my head: I am now rubbing fluoride directly onto my teeth.

So why is my town also dumping it into my drinking water? Then I wondered: How much fluoride is in my water, and how did public-health officials set the dose? Fluoride in large quantities is bad news. Potential side effects, I quickly discovered, include joint pain, bone fractures, sperm decline, dementia, premature puberty , gastrointestinal distress, immune-system dysfunction, possibly cancer, and also possibly lower IQ in children. Children have smaller bodies than adults and thus are at risk of relatively greater exposure when they drink.

In calculating the dose, I thought, the authorities must have taken into account the weird thirsty kid who guzzles water by the quart. But if they lower the dose to avoid harming that child, where would that leave my mother-in-law, who for some reason has decided she no longer wants to drink much water at all?

Is she getting shortchanged? Fluoridation of public water supplies is backed by every mainstream dental organization in the nation and opposed by a lot of people who spend too much time on YouTube. When I was growing up, anti-fluoridation campaigns were the province of the John Birch Society and other right-wing cranks. Now I myself seemed to have become a candidate for the tinfoil-hat brigade.

Yet the more I looked, the more I realized that fluoridation encapsulates several recurring medical dilemmas. How much trust should we give to expert judgment? How much potential harm can we expose one group to in the course of helping another?

And how much evidence should be required before we allow governments to force people to do something for their own good?

Modern dentistry is a formidable example of human progress. Tooth decay plagued everyone—rich and poor, famous and obscure. George Washington, an affluent planter, had lost all but one of his teeth by age 57, when he was first sworn in as president. Washington was not alone. Fortunately for denture customers, Europe had a ready supply. Scavengers followed wartime armies, according to the medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris. After the shooting stopped at the battle of Waterloo, many of the dead were toothless within hours.

In the first decades of the 20th century, American dentists regularly made full sets of dentures for teenagers so that they would look presentable at graduation. American soldiers were required to have a minimum number of opposing teeth: six on the top, six on the bottom. Thousands of would-be doughboys and GIs were barred from service in the First and Second World Wars for failing to meet this standard. From May The truth about dentistry.

So dire was the state of U. McKay was a dentist in Colorado Springs.