Water fluoridation is being pushed by a national coalition of dental health groups which launched a new effort Tuesday to expand the fluoridation of municipal water supplies in America as a way to improve oral health, The Wichita Eagle reports.
“Water fluoridation is a no-brainer,” Bill Bentley, president and CEO of Voices for America’s Children, told the Eagle. America has seen a dramatic decline in tooth decay among children since the 1960s, he added.
Other representatives of the dental coalition, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Pew Children’s Dental Campaign, told the Eagle during a teleconference that in the current economic climate, adding fluoride to water will result in long-range savings in dental and medical treatment costs.
Mary Brown, an Oregon pediatrician and a former member of the board of directors of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said fluoridation has been a safe and cost-effective health measure for children for 65 years, according to the Eagle.
“Communities that don’t fluoridate their water are depriving them of proven cavity prevention,” she said.
Wichita is one of the largest cities in the nation that doesn’t add fluoride to its water supply, according to state and local health officials, the Eagle reports. The city has rejected several fluoridation efforts over the years, and, as a result, is having to deal with a decline in overall oral health, according to one local dentist.
“We certainly see more cavities,” Wichita dentist Brick Scheer told the Eagle. “If you go from state to state, you’ll see fewer cavities in cities with fluoridated water.”
Opponents of fluoridating the city’s water, however, say they will fight any efforts to add fluoride to the city’s water supply, citing their belief that it causes health problems such as birth defects, cancer or Alzheimer’s disease as reasons for fighting against the efforts.
“Fluoride is like ingesting mercury,” James Gragg, of Wichita, who has campaigned against fluoride, told the Eagle. “It messes with the nervous system and the immune system. It’s really scary.”
According to the Eagle, Gragg and Travis Crank put up hundreds of posters around the city last year warning that the tap water is poisoned, even though the city does not add fluoride to the water. Crank, a member of “We are Change Wichita,” an activist group battling water fluoridation, among other issues, believes fluoridation started with Stalin and Hitler as a way to make concentration camp inmates docile.
“It‘s a poison,” he told the Eagle. “Because it’s been going on for so long doesn’t undo the fact that it’s a poison. It’s just a total fraud.”
The American Dental Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Institute of Medicine and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, however, endorse water fluoridation as a safe way to reduce tooth decay.
In an effort to counter what Bentley calls “hysterical” Internet posts that spread misinformation about fluoride, the dental health coalition has started a website called Ilikemyteeth.org. to provide information on fluoride.
