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Fluoridation in the UK

General Jack D. Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?
Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: I... no, no. I don't, Jack.
General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. Nineteen forty-six, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.

Americans used to be smrt.
 
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Flouridation has saved whole generations of people in my city from the pain of tooth decay suffered by their parents and grandparents.
 
lionking said:
Flouridation has saved whole generations of people in my city from the pain of tooth decay suffered by their parents and grandparents.
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Do you think there may be some confounders to consider before jumping on the 'fluoridated tap water is great' bandwagon?

For example, did the parents and grandparents of the people in your city regularly brush their teeth using (fluoride) toothpaste?

Has the general level of education about oral heath and access to dental health care improved over the years?
 
Do you think our government is so capricious as to inflict fluoridation on the population without good reason?
 
I think governmental agencies are made up of people with excessive confidence in what they believe, or are led to believe.
 
lionking said:
And Ivor you have to do better than wikipedia to support your stance:

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
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My 'stance' is that of the review which looked at the evidence and is referenced in the Wiki article (Link to conclusions and full report available on this page as well):

http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/crd/fluoridnew.htm

We were unable to discover any reliable good-quality evidence in the fluoridation literature world-wide.

What evidence we found suggested that water fluoridation was likely to have a beneficial effect, but that the range could be anywhere from a substantial benefit to a slight disbenefit to children's teeth.

This beneficial effect comes at the expense of an increase in the prevalence of fluorosis (mottled teeth). The quality of this evidence was poor.

An association with water fluoride and other adverse effects such as cancer, bone fracture and Down's syndrome was not found. However, we felt that not enough was known because the quality of the evidence was poor.

The evidence about reducing inequalities in dental health was of poor quality, contradictory and unreliable.
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[FONT=&quot]American Dental Society:
[/FONT] [FONT=&quot]http://www.ada.org/public/topics/fluoride/facts/fluoridation_facts.pdf

[/FONT] [FONT=&quot]The British Fluoridation Society has a 139 page brochure:
[/FONT] [FONT=&quot]http://www.bfsweb.org/aboutbfs.html
[/FONT] [FONT=&quot]In the blue bar at the top of the page, the title "One in a Million" is the link to the brochure's PDF. It is co-sponsored by their dental society and health services.

[/FONT] [FONT=&quot]There is a lot more, just search for fluoridation at:
[/FONT] [FONT=&quot]http://www.quackwatch.org

The Wiki might be more useful if it were published on newsprint; but I would still prefer something softer and more absorbent.
[/FONT]
 
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What will people's excuses be when in 20 years time it's found out that fluoride in water contributes to x,y and z negative health consequences?
Remember DDT and thalidomide?
Jeez, early on radiation was thought to be beneficial to health, and was put into all kinds of products. (Now all that is somewhat conveniently forgotten).

So keep it out of the water.
It's also a civil liberties matter. If individuals choose to have fluoride in their water let them do it privately off their own bat. I choose not to, and should not be forced into it.
So I'm with Ivor.
 
20 years? Push your timescale out a lot further because we have had fluoridated water a lot longer here without negative consequences. Water is also chlorinated. Do you want to stop this as well?
 
Of course, by the same measure, we don't really know that smoking causes lung cancer. Damn government interference!

However, we should leave well enough alone. The Brits are known for having excellent teeth, after all.

Linda
 
fls said:
Of course, by the same measure, we don't really know that smoking causes lung cancer. Damn government interference!

However, we should leave well enough alone. The Brits are known for having excellent teeth, after all.

Linda
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:D
 
lionking said:
20 years? Push your timescale out a lot further because we have had fluoridated water a lot longer here without negative consequences. Water is also chlorinated. Do you want to stop this as well?
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Presumably the chlorination is to kill any nasties in the water, which is entirely sensible. With fluoride the stated motivation is not that, but rather to prevent tooth decay.. which does not, as a compulsory measure for the whole population, seem sensible to me. People have individual access to a whole range of strategies they can use to improve their dental health. In fact, they have the best range of strategies open to them in human history.

You say 'without negative consequences'. It may well be that negative consequences are occurring yet it is difficult to isolate them and convincingly causally relate them to fluoridation, when a whole number of other potential factors are at play.
Water is fine without fluoride. Leave it alone.
 
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