fluoride and fluoridation

Today I got to reading another article about how hygiene products will kill you (ok, give you a headache, or maybe cancer). When it got to toothpaste, I was ready for the sodium lauryl sulfate; that stuff makes the inside of my husband's mouth fall apart, and then I don't get to kiss him until it heals, and that happened before we got really sick from mold. The article then went on to say that fluoride'll kill you, too.

That reminded me of an alarmist handout I read from an anti-fluoridation group in the '90s sometime, back before I could look everything up on the internet. It listed all sorts terrible effects from fluoride poisoning and explained that we shouldn't put poison in the water supply. I was on vacation visiting my parents, so I could turn to the local biology teacher and discuss (1) how people didn't seem to understand that high doses of anything would kill you but low doses could be helpful, (2) that the benefits of fluoridation outweighed those ridiculous poison claims, and (3) how unconvincing their handout was.

So today I figured I'd look up the anti-fluoridation arguments on the web, thinking, surely they can't have gotten less convincing, right? Well, they didn't. What with all the easily-confirmable references, they're really convincing. These two were most impressive:

• Not the (US) EPA, but the EPA Headquarters Professionals' Union's statement on why they oppose fluoridation. As a nerd, the second-to-last paragraph made a 'holy s**t' level impression on me:

  We have also taken a direct step to protect the employees we represent from the risks of drinking fluoridated water. We applied EPA's risk control methodology, the Reference Dose, to the recent neurotoxicity data. The Reference Dose is the daily dose, expressed in milligrams of chemical per kilogram of body weight, that a person can receive over the long term with reasonable assurance of safety from adverse effects. Application of this methodology to the Varner et al.(4) data leads to a Reference Dose for fluoride of 0.000007 mg/kg-day. Persons who drink about one quart of fluoridated water from the public drinking water supply of the District of Columbia while at work receive about 0.01mg/kg-day from that source alone. This amount of fluoride is more than 100 times the Reference Dose. On the basis of these results the union filed a grievance, asking that EPA provide un-fluoridated drinking water to its employees.

  I expect their grievance got blown off because the EPA's limit is, ahem, a lot higher than their employees would like, but that kind of thing isn't hanging around on the web where I can find it.


• "Why I changed my mind about water fluoridation." Colquhoun, J., Perspectives in Biology And Medicine 1997 Autumn;41(1):29-44. Mr. Colquhoun is a New Zealand dentist and was a very good fluoridation proponent, so good that he was put in charge of collecting data across the globe to be used to convince recalcitrant parts of New Zealand to fluoridate their water. He ended up writing that article after learning that swallowing fluoride just doesn't help, and in some cases, really hurts. He writes quite well and persuasively, as you might imagine a good proponent of anything would. I find it highly impressive that a serious advocate of anything could not only do a 180, but go out and tell people about it afterward. I mean, how many people in a position of power have you ever heard say they were wrong?

So, um, what does any of this have to do with fluoride in toothpaste? The EPA union statement says that people have to decide whether or not they want fluoride toothpaste exposures to go along with their water, pesticide, and pollution exposures. Although, if you live in Tucson and don't have a filter, you don't have to worry about fluoride in the water anyway.