The opening bout at the Rolla City Council meeting Monday night, Dec. 16, was a battle royale – Science vs. Science – as experts defended fluoridation against experts who oppose the practice.
The tag team match took place for the benefit of the council members, who will make decisions regarding health. Nine of the council members appear to be undecided, while two are advocates of removal of fluoride.
Adding fluoride to the city’s drinking water began in the 1960s when a respected dentist, the late Dr. Carl James, led the then-science-based battle to add the substance in an effort to strengthen the enamel on children’s teeth and prevent decay, especially for children in lower-income families that could not afford regular dental visits.
Ward 2 Councilwoman Megan Johnson and Ward 4 Councilman Robert Kessinger are leading what they say is a science-based battle against the substance, citing a U.S. district court judge whose legal opinion, based on scientific testimony from scientists, was that fluoride harms children by lowering their IQ.
Protecting the children
With the possibility that over multiple generations the Rolla community’s average IQ level has diminished while its teeth have improved – or, on the other hand, Rolla teeth are stronger than ever but overall intelligence has dropped – the council is seeking to move quickly toward action.
Because of the gravity of the situation, the council spent considerable time Monday night, Dec. 16, listening to testimony from practitioners of the science that favors continuing the fluoridation practice, as well as the scientists who urge immediate removal of what they see as poisonous.
Experts on the removal side were Dr. Bill Osmunson, a dentist on the board of directors for Fluoride Action Network (FAN), and Stuart Cooper, executive director of FAN.
Experts on the side of retaining fluoride were Gwen Sullentrup, community water fluoridation and dental sealant coordinator for the Missouri Department of Health and Social Services, and Dr. Elizabeth Lense, a dentist and manager of health equity and prevention programs at American Dental Association.
Mayor Lou Magdits gave each of the dental experts 15 minutes.
After listening to these presentations, there was time for questions and answers.
No action was taken.
Opponents open
First speaker was Dr. Bill Osmunson, who said he promoted fluoridation for 25 years, has been converted.
“Over the last 20 years, I’ve become more opposed to it,” he said.
The government is unclear about the safety of it, he indicated, with the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency both having some stringent rules and guidelines about its use.
“The Florida surgeon general said it is public health malpractice,” Osmunson said, and the Washington state pharmacy board said it should be a prescription drug provided by a doctor rather than mass medicated.
He said the National Toxicology Program has “30 out of 31 high-quality studies reporting lower IQ, many of them at very low fluoride concentrations.”
He recommended that girls and women wanting to become pregnant someday should avoid drinking water with greater than 0.2 parts per million of fluoride (cities like Rolla have levels of 0.7 parts per million) or swallowing fluoride toothpaste.
“The half-life of fluoride in our bodies is about 20 years, so girls should not drink fluoridated water for about 20 years prior to when they become pregnant,” he said.
Infants should be fed mother’s milk or formula made with water containing less than 0.01 parts per million of fluoride, he said.
Everyone older than that just needs to stay away from fluoridated water – or swallowing any spit with fluoridated toothpaste in it, he said.
Proponents up next
Next up was Dr. Elizabeth Lense, a supporter of fluoridation.
She gave a brief history of the beginning of fluoridation. It was discovered when children with stained teeth and no cavities were found. Those were cases where the water was naturally fluoridated at a high level.
Scientists began fluoridating city water to study, and they found in a test at Grand Rapids, Mich., that tooth decay went way down when water was fluoridated.
“It continues to be the most effective, cost effective and socially equitable way to prevent tooth decay for both kids and adults, and it’s especially important for low-income children, that’s where we see the greatest effect,” she said. “We have about 80 years of experience, incredible research that indicate that community water fluoridation is safe and effective.”
When communities stop fluoridating, studies show that dental expenditures go up, she said. Some cities around the world – and even the entire nation of Israel – have reinstated fluoridating because of the financial benefit to families.
She explained that fluoride and calcium react to “re-mineralize the tooth enamel.”
It also has some preventative benefits regarding bacteria, which react with sugars to create acid that result in tooth decay.
Tooth decay can lead to infections, and that can be life-threatening in children. Moreover, infections in baby teeth can spread into the budding permanent tooth, she said.
“And studies show that children with early childhood cavities have a much higher incidence of teeth decay in their permanent teeth. So it’s a problem when they’re young, and then that problem continues throughout life,” Dr. Lense said.
The costs associated with this are high. Sometimes, treatment in childhood decay results in oral surgery that results in the need for general anesthesia.
Without treatment, there can be tooth decay that leads to infection that leads to brain abscesses and death.
“I know you think it’s exaggerated, but, no, it actually does happen,” she said.
Dr. Lense also disputed Dr. Osmunson’s interpretation of the National Toxicology Program publication regarding the danger of fluoridation.
“The monograph says with a moderate degree of confidence that higher exposures greater than 1.5 milligrams per liter – so more than twice what we fluoridate in the U.S. – is associated with lower IQ in children,” she said.
Continuing to read from the monograph, she said, “There’s insufficient data determine the low fluoride level of 0.7 milligrams per liter, currently recommended for U.S. community water supplies, has a negative effect on children’s IQ.”
She contended the scientific monograph used by the fluoride opponents says that the concern about lower IQ levels “does not apply to the low levels of fluoride used in the U.S.”
And, she said, the monograph notes that none of the studies linking low IQ to fluoride were reviewed or came from the U.S. Instead, they were from China, India, Iran and Pakistan.
Socio-economic factors, genetic factors and cultural differences were not taken into account by the studies cited by opponents of fluoridation, she said.
It was that National Toxicology Program monograph on which the district judge based his ruling, she noted.
“The ruling actually cited the NTP monograph over 120 times, but it went much further than the NTPs conclusion,” she said. “NTP clearly stated that it did not apply to low levels of fluoride used in U.S. water supplies.”
Back to the opposition
Stuart Cooper was next up. He’s against fluoridation, and he represents “a group of concerned dentists, physicians, scientists and parents, with the goal of educating potential risks and known side effects of overexposure to fluoride, particularly fluoridated drinking water.”
He argued that he and his group are “not anti-fluoride.”
“We have not taken a position on topical fluoride product products, aside from suggesting them as an alternative to ingesting fluoridated water,” he said. “We’re a public health and environmental watchdog group with over 5,500 medical and scientific professionals who work to protect citizens from overexposure,” he said.
Speaking from New Hampshire, he said, “I wanted to point out that New Hampshire and our neighbor Vermont, are one and two, according to the CDC, in the United States with the lowest rates of childhood dental decay, and yet we’re amongst the least fluoridated states in the country.”
On the other hand, he said, “Kentucky, which is 99% fluoridated, has the highest rate of adult tooth loss in the country.”
Then, reading from the guidelines of the American Academy of Pediatrics, he said, “They recommend zero fluoride for children six months of age or younger.” That’s because, he said, “it provides no benefit whatsoever” to children that young, “yes, no benefit whatsoever, to a bottle-fed infant.”
Adding fluoride to public water supplies means “the same concentration of fluoride is delivered to the entire population, regardless of age, weight, nutrition, status, and fluoridation,” he said.
Moreover, it is done as a medical treatment, “without individual oversight of a doctor or control over their dosage, because everyone drinks varying amounts of water,” he said.
“This is why most of the world has rejected water fluoridation. We’re the outlier. Ninety-five percent of the world does not fluoridate their water. Ninety-eight percent of Europe does not fluoridate their water. They believe it’s unethical. It violates informed consent,” Cooper said.
He presented data from the Centers for Disease Control that show “somewhere between 70 and 87 percent of our adolescents now have dental fluorosis,” he said, which is a brownish staining of the teeth. “That’s a visible biomarker of overexposure to ingested fluoride that’s at a time when the brain is vulnerable.”
Removal of fluoride can only be done by reverse osmosis or distillation, which would be difficult for many, perhaps most, families.
“This isn’t a water equity issue. We’re forcing this on people when it should be a choice, when they should be able to regulate their fluoride consumption in a personal way, and not have to regulate their water consumption,” he said.
Thus, he said, the trend is toward removal of fluoridation in water systems.
“Over 1,500 communities, according to CDC stats, have ended water fluoridation since 2010,” he said. “Even though the population of the U.S. has increased in that time, the percentage of public water of the population consuming fluoridated water has reduced, has dropped.”
In Missouri, that includes Branson, Springfield, Houston, Warsaw, Sullivan, Carl Junction, Waynesville, Buffalo, Smithville, Bolivar, O’Fallon, Neosho and Ozark, he said.
Proponents close presentations
Last speaker, Gwen Sullentrup, representing the state fluoridation program, noted that fluoride occurs naturally in water sources.
“So, fluoridation is actually the addition of more fluoride to the water,” she said. “And that’s usually based on what your natural background level is, and then you add up to 0.7 milligrams per liter. That’s the recommended amount.”
That isn’t much, she noted.
“Just to give you a perspective of what 0.7 parts per million looks like, it’s about 60 seconds in 1,000 days,” she said. “So it’s very small amount.”
She noted that when fluoridation was initially introduced to public water in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1945, it was supposed to be on January 25.
“They actually didn’t get to turn it on until January 31, because they had complications with equipment,” she said. “But on January 25, there were about 200 people lined up outside the water plant door, telling that they had taken a shower or taken a bath and that it had harmed their skin.”
They also told the water company that they had stomach aches from drinking the newly fluoridated water.
“And it hadn’t even been turned on yet,” Sullentrup said.
The naturally occurring substance is harmless in low doses, but those low doses save children from excessive tooth decay, which “is the most chronic disease there is in the United States, possibly worldwide,” she noted.
“It’s significantly more common than asthma, obesity and even diabetes. It is infectious and transmissible,” Sullentrup said. “If a mom has a decayed tooth in her mouth and kisses her baby on the mouth, she can transmit that to the baby.”
Oral health matters, because bad oral health leads to pain, difficulty chewing and occasionally even to death.
Lower socio-economic status relates to poor dental health, as families don’t have money for regular dental check-ups.
“Low-income kiddos are actually twice as likely to have cavities, and in Rolla, there’s about a 27% poverty rate, and that’s at the kid level,” she said.
More than 10,000 studies show the benefits of fluoridation of water, she said, especially for children but also for adults.
She noted that Calgary in Canada stopped fluoridating its water, and its tooth decay rate went up about 65 percent. Edmonton continued fluoridating, and its decay rate remained low.
Meanwhile, Calgary’s rate of general anesthesia treatment rose 78 percent because of increased oral surgery, while Edmonton’s rate rose at only about 12 percent.
She said Calgary has decided to reinstate fluoridation.
“The Department of Defense actually requires that all military bases with 3,300 people or more on the base to be fluoridated, and that’s because about 15% of the troops are not considered ready to send overseas because of dental issues, so they actually have to get a lot of work done before they’re able to be sent over,” she said.
Buffalo, New York, stopped fluoridating in 2015.
“(They) did not notify their community members or the city council. The water treatment plant just shut it off. They had taken a $300,000 grant to upgrade their fluoridation equipment, and did not do so with those funds. Nobody knew about it until 2023,” she said.
The dentists “started a huge outcry, because they said, ‘we are seeing massive amounts of decay in kids that we’ve never seen decay in. We’ve treated these kids for years.’ And then they found out that it had been shut off. So the parents actually filed a class action lawsuit, won the class action lawsuit and were awarded $160 million in damages to be used for dental treatment for all of the kids that have to have their teeth fixed.”
What is the next step?
After all that information, what will the council do?
There was reference during the council discussion that time was needed for council members to receive the written reports from the four speakers – and study those reports.
Council members also needed to hear from their constituents whether those taxpayers want to remove the fluoride or keep it in.
Some council members indicated a desire to have public hearings, giving the voters/taxpayers a chance to be heard.
But Mayor Magdits countered that there is always time at the end of regular meetings for council comments, and he did not recommend a special night, or nights, for public hearings.
So, if Rolla people want to talk about it, this topic could be heard for the next few council meetings.
It is possible that the council could then take action to begin the process of removing the fluoridation system.
Whatever decision is made to protect the children – either retaining fluoride or removing fluoride – will be done by council members who trust The Science, because The Science supports both sides.
Original article online at: https://www.phelpscountyfocus.com/news/article_be89adc2-c176-11ef-8d5a-fb75dcf13a61.html