SALEM – Oregon dentists, who for decades have have come out on the losing side of campaigns to add fluoride to the state’s drinking water, returned to Salem on Monday to try again.
But this session’s opening hearing made it clear that, while the battle is old, the battle lines aren’t.
In decades past, dentists and public-health officials have defended fluoridation as preventing cavities while opponents have cast it as a case of big government overtaking individual freedoms. Some opponents have decried fluoridated water as part of a communist plot.
This year, the pro-fluoridation forces have remained in the same position, but the anti-fluoridation group is looking to change its image, while picking up some new allies, including environmental groups.
Lynne Campbell of Oregon Citizens for Safe Drinking Water said her group is trying to shed the old right-wing crackpot stereotype used to describe anti-fluoridation activists.
“That’s baggage we carry with us,” said Campbell, executive director of the Lake Oswego-based group that formed in 2001 to fight a similar bill.
Monday’s hearing was the first on House Bill 2025, which would require all water suppliers serving more than 10,000 people to add fluoride. The state would subsidize installation costs, estimated at $2.8 million.
Oregon is ranked 46th among the 50 states in terms of the percentage of its population that is on public water systems with fluoride, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The centers’ report, based on 2000 Census data, showed 22.7 percent of Oregonians are on fluoridated water, compared to such high-ranking states as Minnesota (98.2 percent), Kentucky (96.1 percent) and North Dakota (95.4 percent).
Most Lane County residents, including customers of the Springfield Utility Board and the Eugene Water & Electric Board, do not receive fluoridated water. The only Lane County residents with fluoride in their drinking water are those in Florence, according to the state Department of Human Services.
Katherine Bradley, administrator of the state Office of Family Health, cited Oregon’s lack of fluoridated water as a cause of the state’s tooth decay rate of 57 percent among children. She told the House Water Committee that studies over the past 50 years have shown that children who drink fluoridated water have between 18 percent to 40 percent fewer cavities than those who don’t.
Portland dentist William Ten Pas, past president of the American Dental Association, said the state’s budget pinch and the need to trim costly health care programs for the poor should lead lawmakers to low-cost preventive measures, such as water fluoridation.
Advocates’ arguments for fluoride as a potent weapon against tooth decay met with skepticism from opponents.
Campbell raised concerns in her testimony Monday about inadequate toxicity studies and cited public-health research that found no significant difference between the tooth decay levels of two cities in New York state, one in which drinking water was fluoridated, and the other in which it was not.
A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chemist, speaking on behalf of his union, raised concerns about the source of the fluoride used in drinking water, saying it is a by-product of the industrial production of phosphate fertilizers.
“If you want to improve the health of your citizens, our advice is, don’t add toxic waste to the water supply,” said J. William Hirzy, who testified via phone from Washington, D.C.
Brent Foster, an environmental attorney for Columbia Riverkeeper and Willamette Riverkeeper, said he planned to testify against the bill at a public hearing on Wednesday. He cited studies that he said show the introduction of fluoridated drinking water into already polluted watersheds could harm salmon.
Foster said that environmental groups, including the two Riverkeeper organizations, the Native Fish Society and Trout Unlimited, have not spoken out against fluoridation of drinking water until now.
“I think a lot of people are just waking up to the fact that fluoride poses a serious threat to salmon,” he said. “To do something that would add significant toxins to the rivers without even considering the impacts on salmon is troubling, to say the least.”
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