Republicans are working on a bill to prevent states like Vermont

[JackRiddler]

91. There is no big conspiracy to taint our minds with fluoride...

Last edited Mon May 12, 2014, 03:26 PM - Edit history (1)

It's a petty and normal conspiracy of aluminum and fertilizer producers to avoid paying for their own waste disposal. They have contrived to let communities pay them billions of dollars and dump this waste product, fluoride compound, into their own drinking water. Municipalities have been conned into doing so on the ridiculous pretext that it's good for dental health, even though the WHO data for dental health, comparing developed nations that fluoridate to those that don't, looks like this:



In other words, unregulated capitalist enterprise doing what it normally does, without regard for externalities like pollutants dumped in the drinking water.

Some more from old notes of mine:

Controversy about the fluoridation of water are almost exclusive to English-speaking countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada and Australia. That is because these are almost the only countries in the world where municipalities still commonly practice water fluoridation. Every other country has either never adopted fluoridation, or – in the case of regions in Japan and a series of European nations including the two Germanys and the Soviet Union – practiced fluoridation starting in the 1950s and abolished it again starting in the early 1970s through 1990. Today, no more than about 10 percent of the UK population and no more than half of Canadians receive fluoridated tap water, while majorities do in Ireland, Australia and, most significantly, the United States.

The areas that never fluoridated, or fluoridated and then quit, have not experienced a cumulative rise in rates of tooth decay as a result. On the contrary, in recent decades every developed nation has seen a constant and dramatic decline in rates of tooth decay. The above chart shows tooth decay trends for “unfluoridated” and “fluoridated” nations since the 1960s, and is based on the United Nations World Health Organization country index for “DMFT” – a measure of the rate of decayed, missing, or filled teeth among 12 year-olds.

Real-world data are rarely this definitive. The DMFT index has declined in all developed countries. This international trend has been completely unrelated to whether or not a nation fluoridates its water. Despite gathering this data, the World Health Organization curiously still supports water fluoridation, as does the UN’s biggest financial sponsor, the United States government. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have called water fluoridation one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. It is true, as fluoridation advocates hold, that the period of fluoridation has coincided with a dramatic decline in tooth decay; but the above evidence serves to falsify the hypothesis that water fluoridation was a major factor in improved dental health.