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Something To Get Your Teeth Into
Britain's Secretary of State for Health Alan Johnson announced last week a new push to add fluoride to drinking water. It's a matter which provokes strong emotion, with some dentists and government workers pointing to ranks of gleaming-gnashered children in regions where the water has been fluoridated for years, while others point to evidence that it can cause mottling of teeth, or even that the Nazis used the substance to pacify inmates of concentration camps.
The prospect of mass, compulsory medication troubles libertarians, while another study found a high incidence of bladder cancer in Taiwan in areas where natural fluoride levels are hight.
Fluoridation is one of those areas where everyone seems to be wearing a tin-foil hat.
So thank heaven, then for the sensible Bad Science column in the Guardian, where fluoride and its implications are discussed:
"The reality is that anyone making any confident statement on fluoride speaks way beyond the evidence. In 1999 the Department of Health commissioned the centre for reviews and dissemination at York University to do a systematic review of fluoridation and its effects on dental health. Little new work has been done since. In the review, 3,200 research papers, mostly of very poor quality, were unearthed. The ones that met the minimum quality threshold suggested there was vaguely, possibly, around a 15% increase in the number of children without dental caries in areas with fluoridated water, but the studies generally couldn't exclude other explanations for the variance. Of course, the big idea with fluoride in water is that it can reduce social inequalities in dental health since everyone drinks it. But there isn't much evidence on that either.
"So when the British Dental Association says there is "overwhelming evidence" that adding fluoride to water helps fight tooth decay, it is in danger of stepping into line with Ripper (the paranoid fantasist from Dr Strangelove). And when Johnson says fluoridation is an effective, relatively easy way to help address health inequalities, he is really just pushing an old-fashioned line which says complex social problems can be addressed with £50m worth of atoms."
