A bill to promote the fluoridation of city water supplies has apparently died in the Oregon Legislature just as new questions are being raised about the practice.
House Bill 2025 would have required cities with 10,000 people or more to add fluoride to their water systems in order to prevent tooth decay.
The House passed the measure on March 21 over the no votes of 22 members, including Rep. Jeff Kropf, R-Sublimity, whose district includes Lebanon and Sweet Home.
The Senate Environment and Land Use Committee held a hearing on April 27 but took no action. The bill has not been heard from since.
Gretchen Morley, director of the Oregon Health Policy Commission, was reluctant to declare that the bill was dead Friday. But she acknowledged that it wasn’t going anywhere.
“It has not gotten the support to move it,” she said.
The health policy commission had asked for the bill to be introduced and, in a letter to the Senate committee, gave it its “strong and unanimous support.”
The commission exists to make recommendations on improving the health of Oregonians.
The bill said cities with 10,000 or more people would have to fluoridate their water supplies unless they didn’t have the money to do so.
In the mid-valley, the effect would have been nil since the local cities of that size — Albany, Corvallis, Lebanon and Sweet Home — already add fluoride to their water supplies.
Lebanon added fluoride to its water in the fall of 2001 in line with a City Council decision to do so in January 2000. This past spring, when HB 2025 was still in the news, Lebanon City Administrator John Hitt said he knew of nothing to indicate that the incidence of tooth decay in Lebanon had declined since fluoride was added.
Fluoridation has been a sometime controversy in the United States since the middle of the 20th century.
The controversy may be revived by a report in the Wall Street Journal Friday.
In a feature called Science Journal, the paper reported that a 2001 study showed an increased risk of osteosarcoma, described as a rare form of bone cancer.
The study was done by a doctoral student at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, according to the Journal.
It showed that among boys drinking water with 30 to 99 percent of the fluoride levels recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the risk of osteosarcoma was estimated to be five times as high as among boys whose water supply was not fluoridated.
The risk was said to be seven times as high when water was fluoridated at 100 percent of the recommended level.
The Journal article noted that the study had not been published.
In its letter to the Senate committee, the health policy panel declared: “The Centers for Disease Control has recognized fluoridation of drinking water to prevent dental caries as one of the 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century.”
The commission said fluoridation was based on more than 60 years of research, “which indicates that water fluoridation is a safe and cost effective approach to prevent tooth decay.”
According to the commission, the federal agency estimated that for every $1 spent on fluoridation, communities could save $38 in dental treatments that don’t have to be done.
According to the Journal article, though, proponents of fluoridation now say it cuts tooth decay 18 to 25 percent, or less than one tooth surface.
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