Is water fluoridation really safe and effective, as the CDC claims?

Question

A recent National Research Council report in the Spring of 2006 says that the EPA maximum contaminant level of 4 mg is unsafe and should be lowered, although they never say how much.   Given the American Dental Association's recent recommendation that infants should not be given ANY fluoridated water, how can the CDC claim that water fluoridation is still "safe and effective?"  Also, what about athletes, construction workers, renal patients, etc who all drink up to four or five liters a day?  Shouldn't water be safe for everyone?

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

The short answer is no.  The weight of scientific evidence amassed over the last twenty years or so pretty convincingly demonstrates that water fluoridation is neither effective nor safe.

As far as the effectiveness goes, there are at least three lines of evidence showing that swallowing fluoridated water has very little impact on reducing cavities:

1.  Surveys gathered by the World Health Organization shows that the cavity rates in most western European countries, which do no fluoridate, are the same as those in the United States.

2.  A study published in the July 2000 issue of the Journal of the American Dental Association shows that fluoride works only by topical application--as in brushing the teeth--and not by swallowing.  It also showed that the fluoride circulating in the saliva is insufficient to have an anticariostatic effect.

3.  The largest study ever performed in the United States comparing cavity rates between children drinking fluoridated water and children drinking unfluoridated water demonstrated no statistically significant benefits.  The study involved over 30,000 children and was conducted by the National Institute of Dental Research.

Regarding the safety of fluoridation, the evidence is a little less ironclad, but still alarming, that the chemicals used in fluoridating water are not nearly as safe as we've all been led to believe:

1.  Only 50% of the fluoride we ingest is excreted.  The rest is retained in the teeth, bones and other calcified tissues.  Over a lifetime of exposure, this leads to more brittle bones and early symptoms of chronic skeletal fluorosis, which are indistinguishable from arthritis. 

2.  The National Research Council report you cited also listed a wide ranged of other possible negative effects that can occur from exposure to 4 mg per day of fluoride, from thyroid hormone suppression, to reduced IQ in children (from several recent studies done in China).

3. An even more disturbing study published recently by a Harvard doctoral student shows a link between water fluoridation and osteosarcoma in male children.

The question then becomes: what's more important--protecting my child from a few cavities or protecting hundreds of random male children from a slow death from bone cancer?

An excellent document on the risks and benefits of fluoridation can be found at the following website:

http://www.fluoridealert.org/50-reasons.htm

Trending News

Is water fluoridation really safe and effective, as the CDC claims?