Musings: Beware water fluoridation
Studies have found that water fluoridation is ineffective and harmful, a reader writes. Credit: Newsday/Steve Pfost
Contemporary evidence proves water fluoridation delivers little or no benefit of less tooth decay, according to Cochrane researchers in Manchester, England. Fluoridation began in 1945, promising to reduce tooth decay by 60%. Now, it’s only 4% or less, the researchers report.
Long Island doesn’t fluoridate its water supplies. Fluoride is ubiquitous, and it’s undisputable that overexposure is unhealthy. Because fluoride is in virtually all foods, beverages, some medicines, air pollution, absorbed from toothpaste and other dental products, 70% of U.S. children and adolescents are fluoride overdosed, afflicted with fluorosis — discolored teeth — yet tooth decay is epidemic.
The most egregious of fluoride’s adverse effects is brain damage — and the basis of a federal lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency to follow the science and lower allowable fluoride levels in water supplies. A federal district judge ruled in September that fluoridation of water at prescribed levels may pose an unreasonable risk of reduced IQ in children.
Scientific studies have found that fluoridation is ineffective and harmful. Yet, New York State continues to fund fluoridation. Albany is starting water fluoridation while other cities are abandoning it.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims fluoridation is one of 10 great public health interventions of the 20th century but could not prove in court it was safe and effective for babies.
Casey Hannan, the recently retired CDC Oral Health Division director, confirmed that the CDC agreed with the National Research Council’s 2006 findings that fluorides “interfere with the function of the brain and body.” Yet the CDC didn’t act upon these concerns
and can’t cite studies showing fluoride is effective when swallowed. Hannan said the CDC knows no benefit to infants — when neurotoxicity risk is greatest.
The EPA failed us with fluoridation. Artificial fluoridation should be stopped.
— Carol S. Kopf, Levittown
The writer is a media liaison with New York State Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation.
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