There’s also a loony movement here to prevent fluoridation. In the city with one of the highest incidents of tooth decay in children in the nation.
Calgary lost our fluoridation a couple of years ago thanks to the idiots and junk science junkies. Score one for the people who don’t understand anything except things that people like Jenny McCarthy tell them.
Who’s posted any conspiracy theories? I don’t think anybody has suggested that fluoride isn’t good for the dental health of the community, just questioned whether it is $2 million per annum good. And asked who should answer the non-scientific question of “What should our public spending priorities be?”. Should we just defer to public health experts, who will have different priorities that the taxpayers at large? Or should it be the taxpayers, who after all, will be the ones paying for it? There is a misplaced zeal for technocracy; scientific expertise obviously should carry great weight when evaluating proposals, but not necessarily a free hand in ordering them.
Of course, I was hoping this red herring of “conspiracy theories” would be your response so that I would have an in on the dangers of crying wolf with science denialism. The danger, of course, being that if you accuse people who say “It seems like we might get more bang for our buck with different projects” of “SCIENCE DENIALISM!!!”, you only make that charge less effective in instances where people truly are engaging in it (as by denying global warming or insisting that vaccines cause autism, so on and so forth).
I have some doubts if its efficacy is what’s promised, if that’s what you mean. The studies on it are mixed, and often not really well done, or focus on relatively extreme cases. There’s little evidence that it’s the best option, although it’s probably the msot cost-effective.
If I were going to spend my money on dental care, flouridation would be late to the race. We’d probably be better off taking the money and spending it on encouraging kids to brush twice and floss and to use flouride toothpaste, which is more effective at delivering flouride to the teeth and probably maintains a higher level of flouride in the mouth.
Thank you. I was beginning to wonder why it was that putting it in the water was thought to be so important when to me it just doesn’t make much sense. If we have to spend money to make sure that kids are getting fluoride on their teeth, lets give them toothpaste in school and make them brush after lunch, so that it happens at least once a day.
OK, but you’re not a dentist, right? We have no reason to suppose that the ADA is lying about this. I mean, Dr. Smiley, unless he owns a water fluoridation plant, doesn’t get any scratch if fluoridation passes. Indeed, he probably stands to lose a bit, since you generally make more money on crisis medical intervention than routine checkups.
I’m not sure a program that makes any headway on this will be less expensive than just throwing some goddamned fluoride into the water supply, easy peasey.
My point is not: FLUORIDE IS LIES!!! It’s that we get better ROI elsewhere, on different projects (or at least it appeared to the voters of Wichita).
The cost, as mentioned is $12/year per household. I’d say preventing two or three cavities per household on average, would more than cover it.
As for kids drinking water, besides them just drinking the water, any soups or powdered drinks or ice tea or lemonade would provide plenty of water.
And really, do you think $2 million a year worth of commercials to brush are going to change kids behavior in any significant way? There seem to be plenty of such commercials already, and I’m all for them. But as much as it is a good idea to stand over kids to make them brush, it isn’t going to happen. Abstinence education has a better shot at working.
Straight from the tap? The curmudgeon in me says it’s unlikely, but tap water goes into a lot of other things like cordial and those post-mix drinks you get at McDonald’s.
Places without flouride in the water do have higher incidences of tooth decay, and it’s not just coincidence.
Well, but if most kids are already brushing their teeth (which I assume to be the case, it’s not like toothpaste is super hard to get or outrageously expensive, and I have no reason to suppose that poor people are not brushing their teeth), then you’re not going to get a much greater return. (See http://www.springerlink.com/content/t048360372371167/fulltext.html (“However, it is now accepted that systemic fluoride plays a limited role in caries prevention. Several epidemiologic studies conducted in fluoridated and nonfluoridated communities clearly indicated that CWF [community water fluoridation] may be unnecessary for caries prevention, particularly in the industrialized countries where the caries level has became low.”).)
It’s threads like these where I wish the straight dope had official rules against flat out denying facts. But since there isn’t, I feel the need to type in all caps for a while:
FLUORIDATION HAS BEEN STATISTICALLY PROVEN TO PREVENT TOOTH DECAY. THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC DEBATE ABOUT THIS. FLUORIDATED WATER DOES NOT CONTAIN ENOUGH OF THE CHEMICAL TO BE HARMFUL WHATSOEVER. PLEASE GET THIS THROUGH YOUR IMPENETRABLY THICK SKULLS.
Did you even read the peer-reviewed article that I linked to? Or is science denialism a charge reserved for the all-caps set? I mean, I never thought you had a great handle on this whole “science and public policy” thing to begin with, but there is a perverse irony in having my sentence-case post, with citations to peer-reviewed research, denounced as science denialism in an all-caps screed that does not furnish a scintilla of scientific support of its own.
I would like to take this opportunity to weigh in on this discussion. I have been a Water Treatment Professional for almost 19 years, in Florida and Colorado. I have worked with domestic water supply fluoridation in both states. It is an unquestionable fact that fluoridated domestic water has a salutary effect on the incidence of dental caries in children.
The discussion is not whether fluoridation is effective in the doses currently used in municipal water supplies (it is)—it is whether the money spent is being used as efficaciously as possible.
In a typical water utility, the percent of treated water used by residential consumers is about 65% of the total (48% single-family homes, 17% multi-family homes,) the remainder being used by business, industry, and agriculture. Of this figure, about 6% is used from the faucet (as opposed to lawn watering/shower/toilet/laundry/etc.) This includes all cooking, dishwashing and other non-consumption uses. Water used in cooking will lose almost all the fluoride content due to the heat involved, and contributes a negligible benefit.
Even including mixed drinks (as stated above—lemonade, kool-aid, tea, coffee and all other drinks made from tap water), the total percentage of tap water consumed by the target demographic (young children most prone to dental caries) is a small percentage of the water consumed from the faucet. A significant fraction of the drinks most popular with the target demographic are sport drinks (Gatorade and such), power drinks (Red Bull, etc.), soft drinks (Coke and Pepsi products, for example) and bottled water, fruit juices and iced tea. None of these has significant fluoride content, and yet make up a sizeable fraction of the liquids consumed by our target demographic.
If the families of these young children supervise a conscientious program of oral hygiene, using fluoridated toothpaste, and regular dentist visits with [COLOR=black][FONT=Trebuchet MS]professional [/FONT][/COLOR]teeth cleaning and fluoride treatments, the benefit of municipal water fluoridation is trivial (not non-existent, but of negligible utility.)
The premise of introducing medication into the municipal water supply to provide a net benefit to about 1% of the utilities’ consumers is, to say the least, a questionable use of taxpayer resources. Many studies have concluded that the same resources could more profitably be used in other ways, with no loss of benefit to the community.
Add in the expense of transporting, storing, metering and disposing of the fluoride compounds at the Water Treatment Facility, considering that fluoride compounds are considered hazardous materials, and there are significant city, state and federal regulations dictating all facets of fluoride handling and disposal, and the net cost/benefit equation tilts dramatically to the negative.
That there are many reasons for public water supplies to have fluoridation is undeniable. Many families do not encourage regular brushing with fluoride toothpaste, or provide regular professional care, and children in these families will derive a significant advantage from municipal fluoridation. The thesis underlying municipalities such as Wichita’s decision to not fluoridate is that the resources could be allocated in a much more useful way to accomplish the same ends.
The Wichita newspaper suggests otherwise:
[QUOTE=Wichita Eagle]
In communities with non-fluoridated water, such as Wichita, parents who want the benefit of fluoride for their children’s teeth must obtain a prescription and purchase fluoride supplement drops or tablets.
[/QUOTE]
Apparently toothpaste is not available in Wichita.
When I was a young child I took fluoride pills every morning.
Holy shit, DHMO. Good points all around.
Screw fluoridating the water supply. Just mandate that all non-milk bottled beverages* contain fluoride!
- Soda, Energy Drinks, bottled water, juice boxes, etc.
Well, I didn’t see this coming.
[QUOTE=DHMO]
The thesis underlying municipalities such as Wichita’s decision to not fluoridate is that the resources could be allocated in a much more useful way to accomplish the same ends.
[/QUOTE]
What did you have in mind? Advertising campaigns promoting brushing and flossing seem to be of limited benefit to me.
I have no idea what you’re prattling on about. I obviously wasn’t talking to you.
The hell? Your answer doesn’t respond to anything in my post that you quoted.
Is it? There doesn’t seem to be any hard science that says that fluoride in the water is preventing much of anything. And, you aren’t preventing any cavities in any household without children, or that is brushing their teeth with fluoridated toothpaste, so the cost per supposed cavity is higher.
Soup, yes. Powdered drinks, mm maybe. But from what I’ve seen kids these days seem to drink mostly sodas.
Do Britta, etc filters take out fluoride? What about bottled water, does it have fluoride? Quite a few households in S Cal drink bottled water.
I don’t recall anyone saying anything about commercials.
Post-mix?
Do you have a cite that says that? No one else seems to.
What? Are you saying there is a rational, nuanced thought process that can influence public policy, that often takes a careful examination of underlying facts, best practices, and a large body of information that can not be easily summarized in simplistic terms, and that often contradicts seemingly obvious solutions?
How can that be? The title of this thread implied that the Kansas State Republican Party are flaming idiots, and the original post said it was because a majority of the electorate was against the idea of fluoridating the water supply. On these facts alone, these assertions must be true!! Isn’t it obvious??
What possible use would you have for a cite?