Daily Echo - Fluoridation has professionals' support

Fluoridation has professionals' support
IN reply to the open letter to the British Dental Association from Green parliamentary candidate John Spottiswoode (Letters, April 28), fluoride occurs naturally in water, although often not at the optimum level for dental health of one part per million. Fluoridation simply increases the concentration to this level.
Although Mr Spottiswoode does not support fluoridation, many reputable organisations do, including the World Health Organisation, the Medical Research Council and Southampton University academics, because it is effective and safe.
In Ireland 71 per cent of the population in the Republic live in a fluoridated area, compared with only one per cent of homes in Northern Ireland. Mullan (2005) compared the decay rates on both sides of the border and found that rates in Northern Ireland were 50 per cent higher than in the Republic.
Water fluoridation schemes have been in place in Britain for over 40 years -plenty of time to study adverse effects. Yet health investigations in the UK, the US and Australia have failed to find any robust peer-reviewed scientific evidence for cancer, bone disease, kidney disease or birth defects.
And in the most cosmetically conscious and litigious country in the world, the US, which is 70 per cent fluoridated, no case has succeeded in overturning water fluoridation.
As dental health is strongly related to social class, the ethical issue that consultants in dental public health grapple with daily is ensuring that good oral health is not just the preserve of the middle classes.
The economic cost of treating unacceptably high levels of dental decay was
brought home powerfully in a recent Panorama interview with the medical director of Alder Hey children's hospital. Preventable conditions, particularly tooth decay and obesity, Dr Ryan
said, divert precious resources away from treating more serious illnesses.
The BBC programme underlined the trauma experienced by children (and their parents) who have to undergo a general anaesthetic to have diseased teeth removed. Last year, over 500 children in Southampton, required this procedure, each having an average of five teeth removed, despite extensive efforts from local oral health promotion teams and good access to NHS dentists.
As dental disease is preventable, fluoridation helps to promote oral health equality for everyone, including adults (Griffin, 2007); that's why the BDA, and august bodies such as the WHO support it.
PROF DAM1EN WALMSLEY, scientific adviser, British Dental Association.

Same old rhetoric no mention of fluorosis.