What Do We Know About Fluoride?
Those of us who were around when fluoridation of our drinking water started, were told Australian tax-payers would save a bundle by slashing expenditure on school and public dentists, so how much have we saved since the inception of mass-fluoridation?
The fact is, the government can't (or won't) put a figure on it. None-the-less, these are questions all Australians should be asking irrespective of their personal opinions about healthy teeth.
We were promised Australia's health burden would be significantly reduced compared to what we were spending on school/public dentists and we have a right to know whether or not that objective has been realised.
Here's another one: around the same time we were also told, if we paid 7% more income-tax, we would all be guaranteed a pension after retirement. However, by the time many of us reached retirement, the government back-flipped and decided we're not "entitled" to our pensions after all. We have a right to know why.
As uncomfortable as it may seem for them to answer, we must keep asking these perfectly valid questions and demanding adequate answers. To put them down to some type of conspiracy theory is also to disregard what democracy is all about.
Just remember, unlike diseases targeted by vaccines, dental caries is non-communicable so this is not about anything other than the original tax proposal that inspired it.
Let's start with the most obvious questions first.
1) Does fluoride really prevent dental caries?
There is no argument presented by 22 developed countries that topical application of fluoride (ie Toothpaste) has the most benefit to teeth with the least health risk. Due to increasing dental health education and higher standards of living, many of these non-fluoridated countries have reported steep declines in dental caries that parallel declines seen in largely fluoridated countries (Marthaler 2004).
2) Of a dozen different types, which fluoride are we drinking, exactly?
Calcium Fluoride is not 'added' to our drinking water since it is a naturally occurring substance in the environment. Water treatment in Australia consists of the compounds: Fluorosilicic acid; Sodium fluorosilicate; Sodium fluoride, which are not naturally occurring elements but bi-products of industry.
3) How is it manufactured and by whom?
Fluoride begins as a highly toxic chemical waste, extracted from the sludge of gas burners of the metal smelting and fertiliser manufacturing industries, which is then refined to filter various sized particles of toxic contaminants. Many are still abundant in much smaller particles depending on the producer and the filters used. When aluminium (for example) and fluoride occur together it forms a known neurotoxin, which has caused many countries to ban its use, including China.
4) Which portion of the population does mass-fluoridation target?
Australia claims to target low socio-economic groups however, according to current national estimates, 14% of Australian's currently live below the poverty line and less than half of those currently live in fluoridated areas. This equates to approx. 7% of the total dental health burden being addressed by mass-medicating the majority of Australians.
5) Is Australia a leading expert on mass-fluoridation?
World wide health professionals suggest the detrimental outcomes from long-term, systemic exposure to fluoride could potentially shift the economic burden into other areas of health care. Independent health bodies in Australia have determined there's not enough conclusive data on overall health burden to declare mass-fluoridation a reliable science yet.
6) What other health burdens do they mean?
Less than 50% of the fluoride we ingest each day is excreted through the kidneys, the remainder accumulates in our bones, pineal gland, and other tissues. Fluoride overdose is known to cause many increasing health burdens that we are now noticing in Australia, such as:
early puberty,
iodine deficiency,
infertility,
diabetes,
hyperactive behavior,
hypoactivity,
alzheimers,
osteoporosis,
osteosarcoma,
hypothyroidism,
depression,
fatigue,
weight gain,
arthritis / muscle and joint pains,
increased cholesterol,
heart disease,
skeletal and dental fluorosis
7) Are we being overdosed?
Australia has never performed urine tests on any part of the fluoridated population to measure the average accumulative retention rate of fluoride, or any other toxic contaminants it ships with. It relies on a mathematical formula developed in 1945 called Lifetime Fluoride Exposure (LFE), which only estimates how much water the average human drinks over a lifetime.
8) How much has the tax-payer saved to date?
Without first establishing the adverse impacts on other areas of the public health system we currently don't know if fluoridating all Australians is actually cheaper than individually treating the very small target population by conventional means (ie school/public dentists).
9) Who is monitoring the total burden?
Nobody. Many Australians with good dental hygiene practices may well be experiencing other more serious health complications, particularly the elderly, but nobody is permitted to monitor it or draw any correlations that might bring into question this modern day human-experiment.
10) We gave permission didn't we?
No, we have formed a collective community agreement based on very little information that non-fluoridated countries can also attest to. The Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, Article 6, provides:
Any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention is only to be carried out with prior, free and informed consent [and] in no case should a collective community agreement or the consent of a community leader or other authority substitute for an individual's informed consent.
With over 50 years of human-experimentation under its belt, our government still can't report anything more definitive than "We have as healthy teeth as many non-fluoridated countries".
This certainly doesn't demonstrate how our tax dollars are working better to serve us in practical terms; by shutting down school dentists entirely and slashing public dentist funding so severely that it now takes up to 3 years wait to have a tooth removed, there must have been a savings benefit somewhere worth gloating about.
These essential services were as safe as they are today and were able to deliver healthy teeth already, without risking the overall health of Australians. "Healthy teeth" is not an answer, that was going to be outcome either way.
Besides drinking water and toothpaste, how many other fluoride sources are we exposed to in a day? Is it in our canned food as well? Are our frozen vegetables also cooked in it? Is it used on our fresh produce too? What about cordials, soft-drinks and fruit-juices?
With no health monitoring mechanisms in place, an adequate risk assessment is not possible.