Black to help him get to the root of the stain affecting those in Colorado Springs. In , Black accepted the invitation and arrived in Colorado. They gave the brown stain a more technical name tooth mottling, which was later changed to fluorosis and were surprised to discover that mottled teeth were highly resistant to tooth decay. The parents told him that the stains began appearing shortly after Oakley constructed a communal water pipeline to a warm spring five miles away. After examining and finding the water to be normal, McKay advised town leaders to abandon the pipeline and use a nearby spring as their water source.
The town obliged, and within a few years the brown stains disappeared. The residents of Bauxite were afflicted with mottled teeth, but nearby towns were not. McKay asked the town to conduct a study on the water, and returned to Colorado. The water contained fluoride concentrations of Other afflicted communities also showed elevated fluoride levels. Of course, if dental fluorosis were the only effect of high fluoride intake, no one would have ever suggested adding it to drinking water.
In fact, early research often focused on removing it. But by McKay had noticed that mottled teeth had markedly fewer cavities. This discovery planted seeds within the Public Health Service, especially with H. Trendley Dean, a dental researcher leading a long-term investigation of mottled teeth.
He took a nationwide epidemiological approach, identifying pockets of fluorosis throughout the country. As he and his team compiled their data, the correspondence between mottling and resistance to decay became more and more obvious. He believed at that concentration children got the maximum decay-resistance benefit without a significant increase in dental fluorosis. Suddenly press releases about fluoride research became front-page news, and a connection between the chemical and dental health became cemented in the public imagination.
Dean, though, remained careful. Such a wide-reaching step demanded more empirical support, with long-term studies. The bandwagon began to roll without Dean, but he persuaded his colleagues to conduct a serious comparative study.
Their test site would be Grand Rapids, Michigan. Trendley Dean center consulting with colleagues about fluoridation. National Library of Medicine.
By the time of the trial a consensus had largely formed among both researchers and the public. Nearly everyone save the reasonably skeptical Dean expected positive results, and they got them. Fluoridated cities often saw half as many cavities per child as did their unfluoridated counterparts. The results appeared irrefutable. Committee leaders John Frisch of the state dental society and Frank Bull of the Wisconsin State Board of Health demanded action on what they considered compelling preliminary data.
The New York Department of Health quickly offered its own endorsement—also midway through a long-term trial. The bandwagon began to roll again. In response, local poet and political gadfly Alexander Y. Wallace denounced fluoride as a poison, writing letters to the editor, protesting and generally antagonizing Frisch and the city council, which eventually rejected the proposal. After rejecting the proposal in July, by November the council reversed itself: fluoridation would happen.
But in May the City Council secretly ordered fluoridation to begin. Wallace, discovering the subterfuge, denounced the council, framing the issue as a group of outsiders looking to experiment on the population of Stevens Point. He gathered his own group of experts, all of whom urged caution, much like Dean before them. The U.
Breathing its fumes causes severe lung damage or death and an accidental splash on bare skin will lead to burning and excruciating pain. Fortunately, it can be contained in high-density cross-linked polyethylene storage tanks.
It is in such tanks that fluorosilicic acid has for the past half century been transported from Florida fertilizer factories to water reservoirs throughout the United States. Once there, it is drip fed into drinking water.
A worker watching the loading of powder fine phosphate in Mulberry, FL in left. An map of phosphate deposits on the western edge of Florida right. The practice of adding fluoride compounds mostly FSA and occasionally sodium fluoride to drinking water is known as community water fluoridation. It has been a mainstay of American public health policy since and continues to enjoy the support of government health agencies, dentists, and numerous others in the medical and scientific community. Many are surprised to learn that unlike the pharmaceutical grade fluoride in their toothpaste, the fluoride in their water is an untreated industrial waste product, one that contains trace elements of arsenic and lead.
And without fluoridation, the phosphate industry would be stuck with an expensive waste disposal problem. A map depicting global fluoridated water usage with colors indicating the percentage of the population in each country with fluoridated water from natural and artificial sources.
Only a handful of countries fluoridate their water—such as Australia, Ireland, Singapore, and Brazil, in addition to the United States. Western European nations have largely rejected the practice. Nonetheless, dental decay in Western Europe has declined at the same rate as in the United States over the past half century. This is not to vilify the early fluoridationists, who had legitimate reason to believe that they had found an easy and affordable way to counter a significant public health problem.
However, the arguments and data used to justify fluoridation in the mid th century—as well as the fierce commitment to the practice—remain largely unchanged, failing to take into account a shifting environmental context that may well have rendered it unnecessary or worse. An advertisement for the pesticide DDT from Time magazine in left. An advertisement from the s for children's wallpaper laced with DDT right. After following a trail of clues for many years, detectives finally catch their chief suspect and put him on trial.
But it soon turns out that he has redeeming qualities that far outweigh the crime for which he was originally charged.
The indefatigable private eye in this case was a young Massachusetts-born dentist, Frederick McKay. After completing his training at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dentistry, McKay moved to Colorado Springs in to establish his first practice.
In the summer of , McKay and some colleagues inspected the mouths of 2, Colorado Springs children and discovered that Upon further investigation, McKay determined that the Colorado Springs area was not unique.
Our finding that fluoride is effective among all adults supports the development and implementation of fluoride programs to serve this population. And in Portland, supporters of fluoride agreed. Not only is Portland the largest U. Their pro-fluoride campaign pointed out that compared to Seattle, a nearby fluoridated community, Portland kids have 40 percent more dental decay.
The FDA considers fluoride a contaminant, because it can be toxic at high levels. Shark Teeth Have Built-in Toothpaste.
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